Hoist the Colors!

Ok. Ok. Ok. I'm writing my Pirates 3 review. Ok. Really. Ok. Mean it. Spoiler Free (until I say otherwise). It's been out for a month and a half anyway. I could tell you that Barbossa and Governor Swan are the same person, and it should be free and clear.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (AWE).

Wow. I don't know why, but this was really really wow for me. She Who Is My Wife loved it, but not as much as I do. I'm obsessive, so this is no surprise. I saw it again today just to see if I really loved it as much. I did. I might go see it again tomorrow.

This is the Promised Third Movie. Third movies are really hard. Either you topped the first movie in the second or you didn't. So now you either have to top the topper, or you have to make the apology. Also, if you decided in your second movie that you are now making a Grand Epic, you probably left lots of follow up lying about like confetti in your second movie that you now have to make good on. I don't think I've ever really seen it done. Back to the Future had a really good part III. Star Wars, um, no. Matrix? Oh, heavens no.

I'm reminded of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. A movie with, shall we say, flaws. But it also made a LOT of promises. It zagged in a lot of places that (because of the original trilogy) we thought it was going to zig. (I can go on about this a lot. I won't.) The short version is that it was at least interesting in that respect. Episodes II and III almost universally failed to pay of on any of it. I'm not going into detail. I use Shmi Skywalker as an example (don't blink, you'll miss her) and leave it at that.

Maybe this is why I'm so enamored of the Pirates Saga. It leaves very very few threads unexplored. If it dropped a hint (unintentionally in Curse of the Black Pearl and intentionally in Dead Man's Chest) then it pays it off in At World's End. There isn't the Return of the Jedi feeling that the creators are bored with most of it, or that they wrote themselves into a corner they can't get out of. (They get out of some great corners is some delightfully surprising ways.) If flows like the music that George Lucas goes on about. (Lucas says that the reason his stories repeat is because they are like music, with choruses and verses. Uh huh.) There are wonderful variations and reprises, and I think there are only two or three that fall flat or feel forced in the whole trilogy. (Sadly, two of my favorite characters from CotBP, Mullroy and Murtogg are one of them. They should have been in the second movie and they feel shoe-horned into the third. Sigh.)

The Curse of the Black Pearl (CotBP) (actually, the Pearl didn't ever really have it's own curse, it was cursed) was a terrific surprise. Nobody expected it to be good, let alone great. It hit so many great beats, and avoided so many places where it could have been really really bad. And it had GREAT sword fights. And it gave us Captain. Jack. Sparrow. More on that in a bit.

Dead Man's Chest (DMC) has it's flaws. The whole cannibal island bit goes long and gets stupid in ways that CotBP managed to avoid. I've found that without it, the movie is awesome. But DMC also lays a lot of groundwork (and has the task of turning stuff from CotBP that wasn't really groundwork into groundwork).

AWE is complicated. You have to pay attention. Movies like that are usually labeled “un-followable”. Well, so was Raymond Chandler. This is a film that expects you to keep up. And being that I like the setting, and all of the characters, I'm happy for the exercise. I admit, this is a big reason I like it so much.

But how is Jack? Jack is never as good as he is in CotBP. He's just not. He's not as funny. He's not as smart. He's not as misunderstood. I realize that he is in a different place. He's not supposed to be firing on all cylinders in DMC. But there should have been a better way. He almost gets it back in AWE. There was some Jack stuff that really blew me away on the second view. The scene that never happened again in the sequels was when Jack is in the cell in Port Royal. He's listening to the other inmates going on about the legends of the terror of the Black Pearl. They say there are never any survivors. Jack (who is not in the mood to be all Jack-like) says “No survivors? So where do the stories come from, I wonder?” He's smart. He figures stuff out that other people don't. And he often acts the buffoon to cover it. But he's always smart. In the sequels, he's smart just in the nick of time, but you don't as often see the wheels turning underneath. The is fixed up a bit in AWE, but not as much as I would like. There's never quite the moment when Jack just shows up in the cave and Barbossa says “Impossible!” and Jack sheepishly corrects him “No, just improbable.”

So here we are for part three. This is the Return of the Jedi that we didn't get. The one that feels like it was always supposed to be the end. DMC left a heaping helping of loose ends and AWE gets almost all of them. You jump right back into it. I say if you don't know DMC stem to stern, make sure you watch it at least once before you see this one. They don't recap much if at all.

They up the scale in this one. In CotBP the bad guys could have won and it would not have changed much. We're told that the stakes in AWE are the seas themselves. Historical note: In real life the “bad guys”, the East India Trading Company, won for a very long time. (*cough* Halliburton! *cough*) It's movie magic that the rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves, devils, black sheep, and really bad eggs are the freedom loving heroes in this film. But heroes they be. Enjoy it. I love it when Big Social Commentary goes so badly wrong, because then you can just ignore it. (“They said habeas corpus! They must be bad! Like Lincoln!”)

Oh, speaking of “really bad eggs” there are at least a couple more ride refferences that just made me grin. It's nice to hear both Paul Frees and Thurl Ravenscroft in a major motion picture.

Every single character in this flick has a motive. Everyone has an agenda. They took the line in CotBP (“Who's side is Jack on?” “At the moment?”) and ran with it. Allegiances don't just shift, they leap. Good guys are bad, bad guys are good, the only one who stays mostly put is Becket. But he's the bad guy, so there you are.

William and Elizabeth. The love story is great. It nothing new, but they don't pull a Han and Leia (love story? That was last movie!) in this. Will and Elizabeth are still really the central characters. None of these movies are about Jack. They are because of Jack. Will gets a good edge to him and Elizabeth (the distressing damsel) is as resourceful as ever.

Barbossa. Oh, is he still great. You want to see the movie where he mutinies on Jack back in the day. As Depp describes it, "We're like a couple of old ladies fighting over their knitting needles." There's a reason we all cheered when Hector shows up at the end of DMC.

Tia Dalma. She is a force in this movie. Her character takes a rather dark turn right from the get go. She gives Orlando Bloom a lot of help, IMHO. The mischievous voodoo sprite from DMC is quickly gone. She more than anything else telegraphs that it's different this time out.

Davy. Jones. My favorite character in movies in years. More than Jack Sparrow (Captain). He still pays off here. He's not a special effect. He lives. He breathes. He's why I watched DMC as many times as I did.

No spoilers, but Norrington isn't nearly as cool in this movie. He is duped. I can't explain why it's different than it was when Jack stole the Interceptor out from under him, but it is. And in DMC he was so wonderfully damaged. I was expecting him to be a terror in this movie. He's kind of soft here. He's one of the balls that gets fumbled a little.

The Rest of the Cast. They juggle a lot of balls. And they keep almost all of them in the air. They manage to give what would be an otherwise unwieldy bunch of folks all in the right place and doing the right things. Gibbs has been awesome since the beginning. I was greatly surprised at how much I liked Pintel (“Hello, poppet.”) and Ragetti (the guy with the wooden eye) in the second movie. I actually cheered at their entrance this time out. BTW, everybody gets a great entrance. I laughed the second time when I realized that Will's first line is “Jack Sparrow.”

The Song. Pay attention to the song. It explains the whole movie. Really. I love that song.

So there you go. It's awesome. It's fun. It's the overblown sequel that I expect to still like twenty years from now. When you have your Pirate Marathon, you actually anticipate part three instead of dreading it. And it doesn't have a speeder bike chase.

I'll post some of my favorite bits and maybe some of the stuff I didn't like in a spoilerific post somewhere down the road.

Just remember, it's pronounced “E-GREE-JEE-OUS”.