Jeez...the sequels sucked. Really, how hard a formula is this?

Sail
Say Funny Things
Swordfight
Repeat

It had no excuse being such a silly chore to get through. That said, it was still better than DMC as at least there was some clever dialogue.

Finally saw this last night. Given the Rotten Tomato score, I was expecting less, so I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it quite a bit -- more than the second, but still nowhere near the 1st, with which I find very little fault.

I thought it was not overly long; in fact, I wasn't bored and didn't at any time go "Is this over yet?" like I have done for other long films (such as ROTK). I followed all the twists fine and wasn't confused over anything.

The only complaints I have are kind of minor:

1. Callypso was unused; she was released, caused a maelstrom, and that was it. I thought she should have had more of an effect on the outcome. I mean, what was the point of releasing her? The maelstrom caused just as much problem for the pirates as it did for the redcoats.

2. None of the characters were really that likeable; I mean, this is, at the basics, Elizabeth's story -- little girl always wanting to be a pirate, grows up to be Pirate King -- but she brought nothing new to it. She acted like every other ruthless pirate out there and it would have been much more interesting to have her bring something new to the pirates. I'm not sure what, give me time, but something...

3. The ending wasn't that satisfying in some ways. Elizabeth should have ended up being captain of the Black Pearl, not Barbosa. She's the Pirate King, she should have overruled him and gone on to become the great pirate she always wanted to be.

4. Barbosa was more interesting than Jack. What in the world? Jack didn't do much very clever in this film, and even changed his mind about his dream of immortality.

Still, it was enjoyable, but like other sequels that were made as an afterthought only after the original was a hit, it didn't reach the peaks of the original. (Only a few ever do -- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Toy Story 2, Bride of Frankenstein, Army of Darkness come to mind...)

What happened was that the pirates thought she'd be on their side and help them win the battle. But they didn't know just how angry she was at them for imprisoning her in human form, so she personally had no plans to help the pirates. Then, she learned that Davey Jones was the one who told them how to imprison her, so she was even more pissed at him, and thus she just said "f- this shit, I'm not going to help". So, she started a storm, then left the rest up to the mere mortals.

Joy

Glad someone agreed with me. I mean really, the last two movies and almost the rest of this made it plain that Elisabeth wanted more than the traditional wife at home. She wanted to beak free. Yet here she seem hemmed back, controlled and not at all like the previous movies. I couldn't believe the after credits, for her to sit there for 10 years raising the kid? Baaah I hope they have a few alternitive endings on the DVD, one where she takes either the FD, or BP.

I saw it today for the second time and I had more fun watching it. Rating goes up from B to B+.

*My thoughts aren't extremely well organized today, so this is more of a ramble than anything else. Don't be suprised when my thoughts transition from one another poorly.*

It's always fun watching a movie during a thunderstorm. You just have no idea whether or not the lights are going to stay on. And right around the two hour mark, they decided to go off. Luckily it was only for about a minute or two and it picked up right where it left off, but it was long enough for me to lose focus on just what the hell was going on. A maelstrom happened, Calypso (One of the most annoying movie characters in recent history) turned into a giant ala Honey I Blew up the Kid and all hell broke loose. But just like the two hours before that, I just went with it.

My basic problem with the film besides the somewhat jumbled plot (Which I'm glancing over because I don't people see these type of films for the plot), is that it's just not as light as the first two movies were. I'm not talking about the violence (Which was actually tame to what I was expecting based off what I've read), just the overall tone of the film. It's a little darker and I don't think it quite gelled with Part III. Case and point, the ending. There are people who care more about these characters than I do, I think it had to be somewhat of a cheat for them. Or let me put it this way, it would've been a cheat if I had loved these characters say as much as Superman or Star Wars. Pirates isn't supposed to be a tragedy. Then again, there is one reason why people go and see these three films, and that's for Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow. Outside of the horrific opening scene with him, I enjoyed watching Sparrow once again. Is he as light and comical as he was in the first two? No. Should he have been? Maybe a little bit more.

Another small thing that bugged me - what the hell was with all the singing? And the toe guy..............ehhhhh.

Then there's the action. I wasn't bored, not for a second. I thought the action sequences were well done and well choreographed. I wouldn't say it was as clever as the first two films (Outside of Sparrow's rope work during the maelstrom) but it was typical Bruckheimer. As a matter of fact, throughout the film, I kept thinking that the film was extremely, extremely similar to Pearl Harbor and I mean that in a good way seeing as I liked that film (The R-rated Director's Cut). And nothing confirmed my thoughts more as right at the end of the film when a body was draped a flag or a sheet in the water (It was Beckett right?). We get it Bruckheimer. And he didn't even get a splinter as all of that wood was exploding near him? Not one bit went into his eyes?

The thing that worked best for me in this film though was Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa. You could tell he was having a lot of fun playing that character.

So, I enjoyed the performances, hated Calypso, didn't like the tone, enjoyed the action sequences, was amazed by the CGI (Oscar quality once again) wasn't a fan of the ending, and I was never bored. It's the weakest easily of the three.

I'm all over the place, but that saying, I'm giving it a........

B+

It's weird that with a 3 hour running time it felt like all of the characters we have come to know were significantly under-used. I was enjoying Pirates #3 until a tad after they found Jack Sparrow - the portrayal of Davy Jones' Locker at least gave the film a bit of originality but it then devolved into an endless barrage of swashbuckling and betrayal we have seen so many times before...even within the same film. It just grew tiresome. And it seemed like when they were editing the movie they spotted points where the kiddies would get bored and just tossed in some random scene with the monkey, midget and/or parrot and problem solved! It's not that the plot was confusing, just too convoluted to the point where I didn't feel like keeping tabs anymore. We all know that the "good guys" will end up on the same side at the end, so who cares about all the business in between? And oh Calypso turning into a giant woman and then exploding into a million crabs was a real WTF, anti-climactic moment. I know it makes sense considering the mythology of the story and blah blah, but it was still just silly.

Not a total misfire by any means, but very bloated...and if this is the last installment (me thinks not) it went out with quite a whimper.

...... I Liked it...

after hating the hell out of the first two i thought this one was going to be a complete borefest and full of crap but it was actually action packed and quite funny. There were a few minimal things that bother me here and there, one of them being Calypso...yeah... what the hell?

Anyways, i am completly surprised i actually like this one... :S

B

Pirates- C+
Pirates 2- D+
Pirates 3- B

You've started to grow a brain.

... *sigh*

hehe

What creates this film as a modern masterpiece is not its tenchinque, qhich is what throws it off from being a perfect ten, nor its bleak and bland middle, but its wonderous artistic awe, highly elusive orginality which somehow is denied, and its character and charm. Really the last two pirates films which increase in its ability to storytell shows how the modern critic doesn't want a story or true orginality, but more so the same stuff with just a fresher face that follows a formula on how to be a good film. This film is a painting, hopefully one done by the hand of a Vango in which this film may one day gets its praise, but perhaps its oddity will never get its justice and films will stay the way they are forever.



To the film itself, it does have a heavty amount of characters, storylines, and so on, but Lord of the Rings had more, but in excess. The reason it gets praised is for its technical approach, thankfully it didn't sacrafice its artfullness. At World's End however capitilzes on the art more than any film in recent memory of its magnitude. The waterfalls, Davy Jones's Locker, the maelstrom, all of it as if a painting during the Romanticism period (my favorite art period by the way). Another positive is in the characters. Need I say more about Jack Sparrow? His wit is much more hidden in this film, and not so directly obvious as in the last two films, which was dripped all the way down to slap stick in Dead Man's Chest. Here he has his best one liners in this author's personal opinion, and some of the character's best transformations whihc was missing even from Curse of the Black Pearl, the most cliche' movie of the bunch. Next we have Barbossa who seems less menacing, but more interesting in some cases. He and Sparrow play masterfully off each other, the typical pirate against the original pirate. Davy Jones is wrongfully complained in this film. Yes he is far less menacing, but that is the writer's purpose, critics have truly lost their touch if they claimed to get confused and don't understand some of the simplest things, it is as if they choose not to enjoy this film from the moment they entered the theatre. Onto Jones, in this film he really fleshes out where it really was flat in the first time around. His parrelled relationship between he and Calypso and Will and Elizabeth is a posistive comparison on my part. Even the usually dull Will is masterfully toned down after his lead role in the last two films, but still is quite a figure. Instead this one might have had less Jack Sparrow, but the story's theme is more focused on his character it feels than in the last two films, a story of acceptance of death, within yourself, a topic very rarely if ever talked about strengthening the originality of this picture.



Overall the beginning all the way until after they escape from Davy Jones's Locker really worked for me, the middle was too convolted, thus ti doesn't get a perfect grade, and alas the final hour is perhaps the best turn around in a film I have ever witnessed. Much like Revenge of the Sith, this film really should be remembered for its art (this more than Sith), its characters (once again more than Sith), and most importantly its final hour.



A/A+

snicker snicker snort snort

Quit snorting snickers, silly drugie.

Awesome that you loved it so much!

I'm sorry, I don't have much time to post nowadays, but.

*the characters who died were given no ceremony whatsoever. Oh, there goes Norrington. Who cares? Not us, we won't even bother to change the music. Memo to Gore: GO WATCH THE DEATH OF BOROMIR. Now go watch it again, and don't kill off anybody else until you can do it right.

(yes yes I'm sure the music changed somehwere, but if I didn't catch it, then it didn't change enough.)

*The ending is just fine for teenage girls who still dream of their One True Love, but in practical terms, it's got to SUCK to see her every ten years. Poor Will. And for us older folk, just HOW many times do we have to endure the man-runs-off-and-leaves-her-a-baby plot device?

*At the end of the cycle, nobody's situation improves at all. They are exactly where they were at the beginning of Black Pearl. Will and Eliz are WORSE off. What a gyp.

*Will, thank GOD, stayed honorable. H'es the only character worth thinking about. No surprise-- that began in DMC.

B- for the moment. may go up later.

Did you stay for the scene after the credits? Will and Liz are actually doing QUITE well... The curse has been clarified by the writers, and for those who haven't read it, things will become clearer once the DVD is out with all the scenes that were cut. Somehow (and the writers are disappointed about this) a couple of the scenes cut were scenes that clarified the mechanics of the Dutchman/Jones curse, which in the end, coupled with the after-credits scenes, lets us know that when Will comes back, and Liz is still there, the curse is broken and Will is free to be ashore as much as he wants and can pass on the captainship to whomever he feels will serve the ship well.

And sure, Jack ends up back exactly where he was, but that's the point. His character is not meant to change (Depp and the Two T's have often analogized Jack to Bugs Bunny), plus they of course want to leave it open-ended enough for any future sequels.

It's funny, all the critics and much of the general audience complains about the movie being too long.... But all the fans are clamoring to tell Disney that they want the trilogy released as extended editions, with deleted scenes restored (at least, those scenes that don't contradict what's in the movies, like the one from CotBP where Jack puts back the coin AFTER Barbossa's dead, which was cut when the test audience got confused about the mechanics of the curse).

I'm certainly all for extended editions....

Joy

I think I should finally give my thoughts on this and Spidey 3. Suffice to say, I liked both.

I don't see the contradiction. I think there is a massive difference between a theater and a DVD edition of a film like this, but it is all about a film's pacing, direction an editing. It is entirely possible that 30 minutes of added material in the 3rd Pirates film could improve the film a great deal. Depending on what the footage is.

Similarly, despite the fact that I still love the film, King Kong's first hour should have been cut down for a theatrical presentation, a director/editor needs to understand the limits of the audience past the 2.5 hour mark, but I think the viewer's patience greatly increases when they have more the more direct control of the enviornment and convienience of a home theater setting, making it a perfect place to explore more complicated and more character focused scenes.

Take the FotR:EE, for example. The main gripe with Fellowship was that it had too weird of pacing in spite of the massive running time. And yet I haven't talked to a person yet who doesn't consider the EE to be a masterpiece, in spite of the added content.

Oh, but Fellowship EE was sooo good.

It was alright. About on par with the second one. Both are big disappointments, in my mind, when compared to the first one, as tends to be the case with simultaneous sequels. The filmmakers seem to have forgotten what made the first film so much fun and have instead just gone for the epic feel. These films work best when they're about the characters, and the interactions between them - not the expensive action scenes. As such, my favourite part of this film was the first hour or so - before the action started. The last hour might have looked pretty, but I found it kinda boring and rather silly. Not really that entertaining. And the ending is just begging for another trilogy, which would not be welcome.

It starts off great, with the very poignant hanging/singing scene, the immensely entertaining Singapore sequence, and the comically brilliant Davy Jones' Locker stuff. It was uncharacteristically weird and bizarre and whacked out for a film like this and I loved it. And the hallucinations that kept coming back were just as great. And then the very eerie and very sad dead ferry bit. But once they get back to the real world, and start backstabbing each other and meeting with each other and conspiring with each other it loses a lot of its steam. I really liked the pirate's council, even though it wasn't really needed, and Keith Richards' cameo was brill. But by the time the final battle happens, you just want it to be over. It doesn't help that it's not a very thrilling conclusion.

The problem is that there's too much set-up and not enough payoff. There's way too many characters and almost none of them get proper backstories or even multiple dimensions. There's just so much left hanging. They could have cut Chow Yun-Fat's utterly useless character, as well as some of the double-crossing and backstabbing, and used the spare time to actually add some depth to the film. Not to mention it would have shortened the running time considerably. The film was far too long, and, unlike certain epic films, it certainly didn't need the three hours or so. I was never bored, but I'm sure I would be on a second viewing.

The performances are rather uneven, ranging from terrific (Depp + Rush) to downright wooden (Bloom). A lot of the supporting characters are given more to do than the leads at times, which is very strange, and causes the film to lose some of its focus. The dialogue was great (if a bit pretentious) until that silly freedom speech, after which all bets were off. Technically, though, the film is superb. The visual effects are outstanding, the production design, makeup, costumes are all stunningly beautiful and show true care and attention to detail, and even the cinematography is creative and fluid. The score hasn't changed much from the first one but it's still worth a listen, and everything fits together well. It's a pretty film to look at, if nothing else, and some editing and a few rewrites would have done wonders. It's not great, but it's not terrible either, and it's certainly not as bad as Spider-Man 3.

Bllom has been delivering wooden performances since 2001. Physically, his acting is great (and easy to look at *cough*) but his speaking lines are just too forced.

I didn't feel like this movie was too long. They probably could have cut some of the Singapore scenes, but there were no obvious stuff to cut out, as there were in DMC (like the whole cannibal island.) We could have done with fewer pirate deals.

I never did get the significance of the singing/hanging scene, when Beckett says, "Finally." Something to do with the Piece of Eight or whatever?

Once scene I wish I'd seen again -- the knife-sticking scene. Jack and Dying Will and Will Sr and Eliz were all there It went by so fast that I didn't catch who did the actual knife sticking.

Yes, I did wait for the credit scene. I knew there would be a baby.



THE HELL!!?!? Of all the things to leave out, they left out THAT? God DAMMIT, what was Gore thinking? The Dutchman/Jones curse, seriously, is the ONLY plot worth following in the whole thing. Did I care about Norrington eventually choosing a side? No, Gore didn't let me. Did I care about who was making deals with whom? No, I stopped keeping track, figuring it wouldn't matter. Beckett? They left that plot hanging. Sure, he's gone, but what about the martial law and all that? I guess it didn't matter because anybody connected with Port Royal (Norrington, Eliz dad) were gone anyway. Did I care about the extended maelstrom scene? Sure, until about halfway into it -- then I got bored. (somebody compared it to the endless Helm's Deep scene in TTT.) So there's all this junk and they leave out the most important scene of all.

I ddidn't mind Jack not gaining anything, but the Will/Eiz story really bugged me.

let me make sure I get this right: You only have to captain the Dutchman 10 years while your lady love waits, then you're free. Problem is, Davey fell in love with the Calypso/Sea*, who was so changable that she didn't wait for him. 10 years later, he comes back, she's gone, Davey lost his marbles and cursed the ship and made his Psycho Locker land. At the end of this one, Will does his duty, Elizabeth does her duty, now it's time for somebody else's ten years. (?)

Is there truly going to be an extended DVD? If that's the case, then I'll spare myself a second viewing and wait.

---------
* btw, this really ties back to Tia Dalma's comments in DMC
"He fell in love with a woman."
"I thought it was the sea he fell in love with."
"Same story different versions and all are TRUE."
Yep.

I think it was the symbol for the pirate meeting to be called, because later Barbossa gives the coin that the kid had to Chow Yun-Fat's pirate, who listens to it, and he says the pirate meeting has been called. So I guess the singing is some sort of way of calling the pirate meeting.

I totally didn't get that Will was free at the end. That was completely unexplained. Talk about shoddy editing.

I don't think you were supposed to. These are scenes cut, remember. If they even decide to go that route, I am sure it will be explained in the 4th one.

The significance of the scene is that Beckett knew at the very least that the song was a call to bring all the major pirates together for a meeting. And what better and easier way to eradicate the most powerful pirates than to have them all in one place? So, he set things in motion to where the pirates would be forced to sing the song... Barbossa says that the lords HAVE to heed the call...

So, once the song is sung, Beckett knows that all the major pirates are going to be gathering in one place, and all he needs to know now is where. Once that is known, he can destroy them in one fell swoop. But of course, he never counted on the Dutchman changing sides in the end... If he didn't have the Dutchman on his side, he would never have attempted to force the pirates to meet, because the Dutchman, being invincible and the fastest ship against the wind, could have decimated all the forces Beckett could put together.



Here's a summary of where all the swords/knives start and end up; hopefully it'll clear things up, as I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the "knife sticking":

NORRINGTON'S SWORD

forged by Will (CotBP)
given to Governor Swann to give to Norry (CotBP)
given to Norry at ceremony (CotBP)
for some reason, Norry has his sword taken away when he is decommissioned ('tween CotBP & DMC)
Beckett therefore keeps it in his office (DMC)
Beckett gives the sword back to Norry, who's been recommissioned and promoted to Admiral (AWE)
Norry is killed by Bootstrap and stabs Davey with his sword (AWE)
Davey keeps the sword and fights Jack with it in the final battle (AWE)
Davey drops the sword and a soldier picks it up (AWE)
Davey kills the soldier with the sword (AWE)
Uses the sword to stab Will, thus completing the cycle, with this "Sword of Destiny" that was forged by Will ending up being the tool for his death (AWE)

WILL'S SWORD

doesn't go anywhere until AWE, when Will stabs Davey with it; Davey uses his pincher to bend it so that Will can't get it back, thus leaving Will defenseless and leading to his death

BOOTSTRAP'S KNIFE

Bootstrap gives it to Will, hoping Will will use it to free him (DMC)
Bootstrap attacks Will, his memory having been taken over by the ship; Will stabs the knife into the railing, hoping it'll jog Bootstrap's memory (AWE)
It does, and Bootstrap attacks Davey; in the end, Bootstrap uses the knife to cut out Will's heart to replace Davey's (AWE)

JACK'S SWORD

doesn't have any significance 'til AWE, when it gets snapped in half by Davey; Jack drops it when running around away from Davey, but then picks it back up to stab the heart... But Will gets stabbed, and Jack knows that he'll die unless he is the one to stab Davey's heart; so Jack sacrifices his intent to be immortal and puts his sword in Will's hand and helps him stab Davey's heart