13 Worst Films Of 2011: 5 /4 : Ships & Monsters

I’ve paid actual cinema prices to see all four Pirates movies, and don’t begrudge a penny. I really liked the first one, despite Bloom/Knightley, and managed to get something out of 2 & 3, even when suffering through the presence of Skarsgard, B/K, Keef, convoluted plot nonsense and the fact that Sparrow had gone from weird and camp in 1 to mincing ninny by 3, and the way 3 totally wasted the way that in 2 Naomie Harris had brought life and proper sultriness into a terrible stock part. The only bit of PofC: On Stranger Tides I remember clearly is the London segment at the start, which I thought was terrific. The rest is a bit of a blur, although the fact it had Penelope Cruz acting in English and I didn’t walk out suggests it must have been surprisingly bearable.

Whirlpools good. And although the pirates conference wasn’t all that, I liked the film’s Singapore. In fact, I think they’ve done towns well over the whole series.

I often want to like the Pirates films more than I do, because there are things in them which I genuinely like. But I think I have to agree with Swanstep that my big problem is that they have turned into fantasy mush rather than there being any piracy at all. The pirates appear to live in a hermetically sealed world where what they do does not affect anything else in the world (which may be why, as suggested above, the city sequences are good – as they hint at some sort of reaction with the wider world). They are also so poorly plotted, my least favourite thing about the third one is a really clear and obvious resolution of the Davy Jones / Calypso storyline which would redeem Davy, explain Calypso’s issues and still allow for a terrific sea battle being jettisoned for an all in effectsathon.

I wanted a candlelit dinner and no sfx. As ever.

Late to the party, but I’d just like to echo Mark’s ringing endorsement of Pirates 3. The imagery and staging of it all is beautiful – besides the stuff already mentioned, besides the overall “feel” which makes the film seem to take place in its own dream-world, there are set-pieces like overturning the ship, the pirate town, dead Kraken, sailing past the dead rowing the other way, people losing frozen toes… Plus the scene in the Locker itself, essentially a ten-minute standalone arthouse film that everyone involved felt comfortable enough to insert right near the start of what should have been a formula multiplex blockbuster (as one of my friends put it at the time “if that had been in Hungarian with someone ugly playing the Depp role, I suspect a lot of people would be queueing up to praise it”).

But the thing I most love about it is that it already takes on swanstep’s criticisms about the pirates operating in a bubble, detached from the real world. The first film set up a universe with an internally-consistent set of rules – monsters exist, Jonathan Pryce is the government, Barbossa is the baddie, Jack is the hero, Norrington is free to let Jack go at the end with a mutually understood wink, Orlando gets the girl.

But the two sequels are all about what happens when that interacts with the real world. If there’s crazy supernatural stuff going on, and reliable witnesses like Pryce, Norrington and the soldiers have seen it, then the secret is out; the government has a responsibility to investigate, in case it doesn’t end with Barbossa; perhaps all the other myths of the terrifying sea are true. Rather than be scared, reality demands these loopholes, obstacles to commerce, be closed. Pryce and Norrington, whose actions in the first film are pirate-movie acceptable practice, both have their lives ruined and then taken away because they didn’t immediately choose a side – magic or reality – and either join the pirates, or put a bullet in Jack’s head at the first opportunity. Orlando and Keira spend most of the second film bickering. The second film, for me the weakest of the three, actually has much more daylight and sunshine and fresh air and outdoor jungle fun and sea and sand than the first, but there’s a timer in the background that can never be fully ignored, that this is all a distraction, that the serious business is yet to come.

There are hints – the good honest (serious) merchant who never wanted anything to do with this nonsense, but gets sucked in anyway thanks to Keira, reluctantly decides to engage with the crazy magic pirate world, and is rewarded by him and his crew being horribly killed, for instance. The two worlds are incompatible, and Jack, Orlando, Keira and Norrington spend most of the second film inadvertently trying to prove it by doing Tom Hollander’s bidding against Davy Jones. But the third film is all about what happens when the serious business collides head-on with the magical world.

That’s what’s at stake; it’s fantasy against reality, the pirates are fighting – and willing to die – to save their magical world in the face of the new, realistic, commercial, *boring* mortal world that has been impinging on their fun year on year . Not even to preserve it, except for a temporary stay of execution (it’s accepted that things can’t carry on like this – it just won’t be ending *today*, thank you very much), but to save some remnant of it for the future. Can’t say there’s no Flying Dutchman, can’t stop that myth, because Orlando’s taken the job, apparently in perpetuity. Every year there’ll be less and less magic in the world, but there’ll never be *none*.

Pirates 4 is a fairly dull straight sequel to Pirates 1, with none of the crazed experimentation and big questions of 2 and 3, and centred around a stock character we’re getting sick of seeing (by the end, Barbossa is the more interesting and sympathetic lead). Strangely appropriate that it gets bracketed with the shoddy Narnia adaptation, beside the obvious ship-based franchise extension thing – they’re both franchise extensions which miss the point, ticking some boxes but (for me) losing the sense of unpredictable wonder that came with both Pirates 3 and the Dawn Treader book.

(tl;dr – this would have been better as the germ of a blog post somewhere I suppose… still hopefully the idea comes across.)

BTW, the ‘this guy’ link in #16 is to a fictional character as far as anyone knows….my apologies.