One year after Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest comes its partner, another part of the same super-long movie, At World’s End. The production details behind forcing the Pirates series into a trilogy are known by now, so all that needs be said of At World’s End is how it satisfactorily (or doesn’t) conclude the plot left so far unresolved. (Oh, and on its own this entry – to say nothing of the greater two-part trilogy – is arguably the priciest film ever made! That doesn’t count for nothing.)
Keep in mind, At World’s End was being filmed while they still didn’t know where it was headed. Worse still, Dead Man’s Chest was already well in theaters (and ridiculously successful, despite its issues), meaning the story was now shackled to certain ideas. There would be no rewrites…except for those arriving on a daily basis, no doubt a scheme cooked up by the writers to spend their time in the Bahamas alongside Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, and the endlessly exotic Gore Verbinski.
These are not ideal movie-creating conditions. And there’s no more room for narrative frivolity, such as seemed to dominate 80% of Dead Man’s Chest – no more time for the fun, though infinitely pointless, comic set pieces such as the skewer or the water wheel. Now they have to tie up all ends! Thought the story, boiled to its Star Wars-esque essence is the same as all blockbusters (rebels vs. empire, good vs. evil), the Pirates habit of convolution muddies those waters perpetually. So in actuality, here is what needs to be resolved…
• Get Han Solo – excuse me, Jack Sparrow – out of Davy Jones’ Locker…of course first they have to find the locker, requiring a fetch quest for the charts. And another quest for a ship. And another for the crew. Somehow, with all these needless preliminaries, frivolities are no longer allowed, but time wasting still is.
• Having expended so much former energy breaking up Elizabeth Swann (Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bland – er, Bloom), they now gotta expend the same amount of energy reuniting them – a zero sum gain in total.
• Figuring out how the newly resurrected Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) fits into everything, hastily rewritten as a good guy. And because inquiring minds want to know, justifying further why Barbossa could’ve been revived without an hour-long detour into purgatory, but Depp – er, Jack – cannot. To answer this niggling plot hole, they essentially go with “Because we said so.” Because the metaphysics of the Pirate-verse are growing even more arbitrary, subservient to the strangely mutating plot.
• Continuing tale of Will’s father Bill (Stellan Skarsgård, of both accursed Exorcist prequels), himself alive again after having been declared dead (way back in The Curse of the Black Pearl). Of Will’s need to barter, bargain, and otherwise sneakily deal daddy off of Davy Jones’ Flying Dutchman (a mythic ship I saw fit not to mention previously). And whenever possible, aligning these self interests with having all good guys good and bad guys bad.
• Speaking of bad guys, seeing what the East India Company’s megalomaniacal generalissimo tyrant warlord (huh?!) Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) does now he’s attained the “Dead Man’s MacGuffin.” Basically, this gives him the leverage to command Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his fishy crew, even though formerly when Jack was in the exact same position, he was thoroughly unable to sway Jones in the slightest.
Deep breath!
• As for Jones, they’d formerly established that he went and turned all villain over love spurned…because, with the glorious exception of Jack Sparrow, no Hollywood blockbuster can think of motives beyond love, or possibly revenge. This means finding who Davy’s former beloved is among the cast…which shouldn’t be too difficult, seeing as Pirates rivals Star Wars for its paucity of females. All this to give Davy a tragic redemption arc, ala Vader in Return of the Jedi – this film’s major structural influence.
• Then there’s James Norrington (Jack Davenport), the commodore-turned-drifter-turned-pirate-turned-traitor-turned-admiral [sigh!], now another tool under Beckett’s employ, and himself seeking a redemption arc. It’s inevitable someone would get lost in the shuffle, so James just sorta dies at midway, all rather thanklessly.
• Oh, and that tasty Kraken cephalopod which drove the entirety of Part Two? Eh, it doesn’t jibe with the new set pieces, so it’s dead. Killed twixt films. How anticlima-
No doubt I’m forgetting half a dozen further subplots and character motivations (as ever, I’ve been rather mum on Jack, mostly because these bloated sequels continue to lose sight of him themselves). There are always, always more supporting characters under the rafters – Gibbs, Governor Swann, the hilarious pirate duo Pintel & Ragetti, the hilarious sailor duo Mullroy and Murtogg (sounds like the leads of Lethal Weapon), and also a dwarf, a mute, a monkey, a parrot and a dog. Each has motivations and sub-motivations (yeah, even the parrot!), and each motivation is treated with dead seriousness – we’re talkin’ humorless, choir-bound gravitas, like bloody all blockbusters, excepting Iron Man. Weird, truly, when the one-gag doggie from Part One (lifted from a single animatronic on the ride – ride, what’s that now?) takes on Shakespearean levels of importance.
Wanna try for more? Why the hell not! For all this is just the leftover plot garbage, and a sequel (to justify its existence, and draw viewers in with misleading posters) needs new characters, more and more, until there are seemingly thirty-six major speaking parts racing all about. Chief among the newbies is Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat). What his purpose is, I cannot say, except to fuel certain plot arbitrations when the need arises. And to fuel a brief, visually murky detour into Shanghai, which…Okay, what is the geography of these “Caribbean” movies?!
What of that plot? – for as involved as anything that must needs conclude in a big shiny battle can be. Frankly, the sojourn into Davy Jones’ Locker bears roughly 0.0 relevance to the rest – it simply exists to get over the hugest hurdle Dead Man’s Chest left in its wake. Odd, then, that it lasts about as long as whole movies once did (Duck Soup is shorter than the First Act of At World’s End), and that it delays Jack’s introduction for a whole half hour. That is a perverse decision indeed. All the Locker is good for is affording some family friendly goat-fucking surrealism, the sight of Jack and his ship in Utah’s Bonneville flats – all this a notion Verbinski would improve upon in Rango.
Anyway, once that initial hour and change has passed by, then the movie can start. Now pertinent facts come into play: Beckett has overshadowed Jones as the series’ central villain, the Emperor in the form of a chubby, short little British fop in a wig. It truly is, well, just bizarre that peacekeepers are shown in an evil light, while drunken, sodomizing pirates are the goodies. That’s a moral position I cannot reconcile, which is far more troubling at a distance than when watching the film.
Anyway, Beckett earns his villainy (far removed from any historical example) by enacting widespread genocide in the opening scene…of a Disney movie…including the morbid hanging death of a young boy. Enjoy, kids!
Okay, all that needless mass death distracted me, though it makes me think none to highly of our “heroes,” thus far solely concerned with rescuing merely Jack freaking Sparrow. Even then, Beckett is a threat to be reckoned with – because he has Jones. And Jones, even without his loyal Kraken, has the superweapon to control the seas: the Death Star – er, Flying Dutchman. Yeah, one ship, and one tentacly dude, that makes Beckett a rampaging supervillain. Even when Jack was this close to stopping both Jones and that big squid previously. Really, I’d wager Beckett’s climactic armada of CGI ships is his greater asset (for his dread scheme to rid British colonies of criminal element – boo! hiss!). No matter, it’s Jones who represents Beckett’s threat, because the plot prefers it this way – it keeps all motivations surrounding the heart first and foremost, and without that, Part Two would be a total waste.
To create the impression of a new, self-contained story (hah!), many new facts emerge. You know, 85% into a trilogy is not the time to resume exposition! So be it. The Brethren Court is called (summoned by that singing dead child – well that OKs it!), this being a council comprised of the Nine Pirate Lords. Why, because for the climactic battle – basically, the Jedi battle, only with the sea replacing space, and ships replacing…er, ships – for this battle to happen, all the world’s pirates must unite. And pirates, being such a rule-abiding lot, may only do so with a highly ceremonial assembly (a dialogue-crazed moment, when we’re all parching for a swordfight). Barbossa is one of the nine. So is Jack. So is Sao Feng, only he’s died now of writer’s convenience, replaced arbitrarily by Elizabeth.
Once this court is assembled, one stops to ponder how we got here from The Curse of the Black Pearl. Each film employs much talk about the Pirate Code, as laid forth by Morgan and Bartholomew. Whereas Black Pearl treated the code as, well ,”more guidelines than actual rules,” At World’s End regards it with pomp and circumstance, like holy writ as passed down by Jesus, Mohammed and Keith Richards combined. When the choirs start chanting the actual, physical presentation of the codex, it’s hard to read this as anything but a joke. In this context, it’s hard to accept Jack and Barbossa were once permitted their blood feud (up to and including Barbossa’s death – he got better) over mere Aztec gold?
At least there’s an end to this madness. The council, at Barbossa’s behest, debates a panacea to resolve the Beckett threat: the goddess Calypso. Oh joy, another left field new development! Settle in, folks! For Calypso, the goddess of the sea, was previously bound in human form by the first Brethren Council – oh, and this obeah Tia Dalma (Naomie “28 Days Later” Harris) happens to be she. (To hear writers Ted Eliot and Terry Rossio tell it, that purposeless cannibal island detour in Part Two exists to ready us somehow for the idea of a god in human form – because they at least recognize how random this all seems otherwise. But that gives you a good idea of how artlessly things are assembled.)
Now, Barbossa aims to “free Calypso of her earthly bonds,” anticipating that she’ll be grateful, and defeat the East India Company in the pirates’ stead. Hence the extended Jack rescue, because he – as a Pirate Lord – has one of nine pieces of eight (now there’s an awkward mouthful – that’s what she said!). With all nine of the eight (urgh!), ceremony can follow ceremony, and voila, Calypso is Calypso. By the way, this process involves Elizabeth getting nominated Pirate King, which is just silly. Unconsciously silly. What a strange evolution she’s undergone, from governor’s daughter to freaking king (er, “queen,” I guess). Though we’ve already swallowed that a homebody could wield swords at ultra-pirate levels.
So at long bilge rat last Calypso is freed, just as hundreds of ships face each other. And she…does nothing. Nothing helpful, at any rate. Surely nothing to help the pirates – well that past hour was a whole lot of nothing (this is the ongoing Pirates mantra)! The lone outcome is she creates a massive whirlpool (or maelstrom) to host the final ship-to-ship struggle. So…all that work to allow for a CGI effect, in a desperate attempt to inject some novelty into the series’ eleventh ship-bound action sequence.
Boy am I sick of the sea! That we’ve now a solid forty minutes of unvaried actioning ahead of us doesn’t help. The climax is long to justify the extended setup; the setup is long to justify the extended climax. It is not earned. A shame, because shortened, and placed in a more dramatically sustainable context, this finale – complete with Jack dueling Jones upon the masts – could be rousing.
Frankly, there’s little room for anything rousing, let alone good old swashbuckling, with three hours of plot, and characters conspiring against each other like “Survivor” contestants. Absent supernaturalism (the theme being its fading – who thought that would make for fun popcorn fare?), there isn’t much new novelty to be gotten from the sea setting. Whatta we got, aside from that danged whirlpool? Um…doldrums…a green flash…fog. From a series that once reveled in zombie skeleton fish monster ghost monkey pirates, this doesn’t suffice.
Oh, and of those hundreds of ships, only three engage in battle, which is just woefully perverse!
Any of the criticisms you could lobby at the overlong multi-film epics of the past easily apply to At World’s End, and retroactively to the whole Pirates of the Caribbean saga (though The Curse of the Black Pearl escapes unscathed). That includes the overlong ending, Return of the King style, only minus that film’s justification as part of a literary adaptation. The Lord of the Rings took a simple and proven story as its spine. Star Wars (the original trilogy, that is) used Joseph Campbell monomyth, and is equally simple even while being original. Pirates of the Caribbean has no elegant, universal plot. Rather, it complicates from the top down, to the point where minor details can change story conditions in an instant.
This is the risk one runs when retroactively developing a trilogy. At At World’s End’s end, it seems then this ought to be it for the Pirates movies – they banked on a trilogy in favor of potentially unlimited self-contained adventures, James Bond style. It’s the pragmatic approach, as it guarantees three films, the larger story demanding audience involvement where isolated sequels cannot. The tradeoff is no sequels can follow once a trilogy is complete, not without undermining that whole enterprise in the first place – oh wait.
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