This week @ the Byrd: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
photo credit:
Jake Lyell
The inside of Captain Jack Sparrow’s brain is a marvellous thing: richly detailed, over the top, and full to the brim with nonsense. Disney’s new Pirates of the Caribbean installment, At World’s End, occasionally opens a tiny window into the character whose massive popularity was brought about, and let’s give credit where it’s due here, by Johnny Depp, my praise of whom has been contained in a footnote, so as not to bore those of you who are not interested.* Luckily for Disney, Captain Sparrow’s dramatic death at the end of the second film is reversible, and his lovable gang of dentally-challenged pirates joins up with their erstwhile foes from the first film (you know, the ones that turned into comical skeletons in the moonlight?) to challenge the British Armada, under the employ of which struggles Davy Jones and the slimy crew of the Flying Dutchman, which also contains Will Turner’s doomed father. You think that sentence was confusing? Print it out, cut out all of the nouns, scatter them to the winds, lead a lovable gang of dentally-challenged pirates on a mission to retrieve them, tape them together, douse it with rum, light it on fire, and shoot it out of a cannon. Tadow! You’ve just achieved the same effect as a screening of At World’s End!
If you bothered to read my footnote, you might presume that if there is a way to glorify a Depp movie, I am loath to pan it. And that’s usually because his talents honestly tend to bolster a film’s attributes. POTC:AWE is no exception, of course. The tried and true Captain Sparrow continues to delight, especially as Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbosa is back for him to play off, but the rest of the film crowds in so closely on either side of Jack that it’s difficult for him to get enough screentime to steal the show.
And the rest of the film is not that great. It’s so plot-driven that it doesn’t take enough time out to explain what’s going on (like in Black Pearl) or entertain us with some amazingly choreographed fight sequences (like in Dead Man’s Chest). Instead it’s almost all action, ship vs. ship, pirate councils, arguments, giant women, explosions, tense meetings, and whirlpools. The film only slows down long enough for various loyalties to flip flop and motives to be reconsidered, tangling the plotlines so much that I think I blacked out during parts of it. I think my brain went into defense mode and cut out anything too confusing to string together. As a result, I just found myself rooting for Jack, dimly aware that Keira Knightley was stomping around gnashing her teeth at everybody, but completely surprised every time Orlando Bloom popped up on a boat, having completely forgotten for whose pirate-team he was now pirate-playing.
I have a friend who suggested that perhaps I found At World’s End so confusing because it is for minds less “simple” than my own. After I finished removing him from my “people who might want the gift of a home-baked pie now and again” list, I considered this seriously. Am I just stupid? Surely not! Besides, if I’m stupid, a whole lot of other people are too, and if you think Disney’s going to intentionally make a film that’s going to confuse most of the populace, you’re mistaken. Nope, I believe it was the curse of the trilogy. Trying to wrap up too many things at once with the third film, whereas the first is perfectly digestible, being more of a complete story within itself, and the second is free to focus a little more on artistic expression – taking the first film’s story and pushing it into new directions. Of course, I may have found it a mite easier if I’d watched both of the other films several times beforehand, with a pen and a notebook and a compass and my thumb on pause. But maybe your mind is a little more complex than mine, a little more like the mind of Jack Sparrow himself, in which case you might be able to make sense of it all. But enter ye with caution, or whatever, because all of a sudden you will wake up and Keira Knightley will be a Chinese pirate king, and I will give you five gold pieces if you can “savvy” an explanation for how you got there.
*JD has limitless talent and painful good looks, in addition to his obvious genius and potential to leave a gaping hole in the world of cinema upon his departure from this world, at which point I will lead a crew of ruffians on a ship to the ends of the Earth to bring him back and restore him to his throne as king of the thespians. Also, I bet he is a killer dad.
