Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Review)

AVAST! It seems like just yesterday it was 2006 and everyone was having their collective minds blown by the sheer production value of Gore Verbinski's second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly, and the rest of the gang were facing off against the monstrous Davy Jones (Bill Nighy).

Amazing cinematography. Witty dialogue. Incredible action sequences. Top-notch world building. Heroic heroes and villainous villains. Computer effects so convincing they still look great a decade later. And a truly unforgettable musical score.

So what happened?

The real answer to the question might be forever lost to time, but considering we have another PotC movie coming out this year I thought it'd be good to examine where the last film dropped the ball. I mean, it kind of dropped the ball everywhere, balls on the ground/balls all over town.....but we'll go down the list.

1. It completely misuses music and visual effects.

So like I said above, Pirates 1, 2, and 3 have phenomenal scores, in my opinion on par with Star Wars. In FACT I this trilogy I consider to be a worthy successor to the Star Wars trilogy. And I feel more or less about On Stranger Tides as many feel about The Phantom Menace. A film which, by the way, completely does not deserve the hate.

But I digress, the music is completely misused. It just shows up randomly and acts as background noise instead of an actual theme. It's lost amid a barrage of sound effects and stilted one-liners. It lacks all of the charm and pacing that the first three have.

And as for the Visual Effects well it's even more bleak. For some reason, and I don't know why. The first three films have amazing SFX. Some of the moonlight scenes in the Black Pearl look a little dated sure, but everything from the later 2 movies is completely believable. In this movie, not so much. Water crawls like insects and cartoony ropes snatch people up. It's sub-Transformers quality.

2. The story makes NO sense.

I use the term story here to loosely describe the plot. There barely is one. There's an A to B thing going on, basically Jack, Blackbeard, and Barbossa are all racing for the fountain of youth for different reasons, but everything that happens inbetween is a complete blur. It's all arbitrary. It feels more like a bad video game than a well-constructed film in a multi-million dollar franchise.

More specifically the items Jack has with him, namely the compass, makes an appearance but serves no thematic purpose whatsoever. In the original series, the compass was used to illustrate Jack's inner-conflict. His love of booty and his love of Elizabeth Swan's booty ;)

Such a conflict is absent in this movie, and whatever romance they try to cram in between Angelica and Jack is forced and predictable.

And, while not directly tied to story, a great deal of this movie takes place on land. Whereas previous installments saw the characters nearly always on the deck of some sea-vessel, this movie brings us ashore for the vast majority of the film, and it suffers for it. Action scenes are strangely boring and lack any of the precise choreography that made the sword fights and pistol duels from the earlier films so engaging.

3. The villain SUCKS.

Davy Jones was deep. Beckett was so sinister. Barbossa was the very definition of pirate. And Calypso was mystical and fascinating. The villains of the series up to this point have been truly, honestly unforgettable.
Cutler Beckett and Davy Jones especially are standouts in an era where "puppet and puppeteer" villains are so often done badly.

Hot.

Not.

So WHY DOES BLACKBEARD SUCK SO BAD. Supernatural for seemingly no reason and completely devoid of any sort of charisma. I'm tempted to blame the actor, but I have a feeling it was director Rob Marshall whose only other credits are musicals. Yikes.

In fact, all the characters feel flat. Even, AMAZINGLY, Jack Sparrow himself. Barbossa especially gets the short end of the stick with barely any screen time and no good dialogue scenes. All of it is pushed aside to make room for Penelope Cruz's boobs, which admittedly, are the best part of the movie.

So yeah, those are the main three that really drive this incoherent mess of a movie down into the dumps. But it's not something I revel in trashing. I love the first three movies so much. They get better with time. Seriously, go watch them right now, I'll wait.

You see? I told you.

Point is, this film is a complete inversion of all the good qualities that made the originals so great. I'm just hoping with all my heart that they'll do right by the series and make this next one great. I'll be there in that theater. I just hope that the two nobody directors they got for this one have better sea legs than the last guy. Or THEY'LL WALK THE PLANK.

PS.

I get they were trying to do a classical thing with the mermaids, so they just made them hot babes with sharp teeth, but come ON. You guys nailed a unique interpretation of Davy Jones and the Kraken, were mermaids really that much harder? Even Harry Potter had better mermaids and they were still pretty boring.

To this day only one movie has impressed with it's mermaids, not including Lady in the Water. Turns out besides having a kickin theme song, the 2003 Live-action Peter Pan movie had awesome mermaids! And this was a kids movie.

Yeesh.

So it's basically just a feral fish girl but it totally works. Go look up the scene if you don't believe me.