01. LOVED the opening. It was freakishly, ghoulishly cool and totally set the tone for what this movie could have been rather than what it actually ended up being. I mean cripes, they’re going to rescue Jack from beyond the veil some sort of not-actually-dead purgatory type joint and yet they managed to make all of this terribly unscary. Amazing feat, that.
02. Although, yes, it does make sense for Jack’s own personal undead hell to be a giant desert with nary a drop of water in sight.
03. Can’t say, though, that I enjoyed the gaggle of Jack Sparrows that kept popping up whenever he wsa hallucinating. It’s like The Island: more than one Ewan McGregor should make a movie more awesome, not less, but it didn’t do anything for me there and it certainly didn’t do anything for me here. Except for the dude with the peanut.
04. On the one hand, I’m glad they got rid of the recycled jokes that they relied on too heavily in the second film. On the other hand, even though those jokes quickly became tiresome, they were still mildly funny and I thought this movie really brought the unfunny in spades. These are action adventure type films, obviously, but the comedic aspect was really one of the highlights of the first film and it feels like they’ve really lost that in this one. Which would be fine if they had taken that left turn at Freaskishly, Ghoulishly Cool after the first scene, but they didn’t. Don’t cut the funny without replacing it with something else.
05. Okay, the ongoing “my telescope is bigger than your telescope” gag was kind of funny. Not overly intelligent, but funny.
06. I’ve never been a huge Will Turner fan, but I like him even less now because he’s so ridiculous. I could not take poor Orli seriously as his shirt billowed around him so that it would reveal the huge, fresh scar on his chest. And the scarf in his hair? LKAJSDLJA:LKSJD HI, YOU’RE NOT JACK SPARROW, THIS LOOK DOES NOT WORK FOR YOU. In the scene after the credits where he rolls up (drifts up?) in his boat and he’s standing there all satisfied with himself and the fact that he’s a Totally Awesome Pirate Captain, I died because he looked so ridiculous. The background was all pink-hued sunset and all I could think of was Rose in Titanic going “I’m flying, Jack!”
07. Speaking of which, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie and had so many fandom-crossover thoughts pop into my head. Everytime a ship was about to sink, Audrey and I kept whispering lines from Titanic to each other. When Will and Elizabeth decided to get married right there on the ship, my first thought was that as Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin, Barbosa can totally marry them right then and there. Everytime they said “nine pieces-of-eight”, Cate Blanchette’s voice would pop into my head saying “And nine, nine pieces-of-eight were gifted to the race of Pirate, who above all else desire power…” and then we’d find out that there would be One Pirate To Rule Them All and then… oh wait, yeah, that’s what happened.
08. So, admit it: did you think Barbosa was a far better pirate in this one than Jack Sparrow? I did. Jack Sparrow ain’t what he used to be. He was so whip smart in the first one, playing everyone and everything off against each other to his own ends. In the second one he was a little more unstable and wacky, but understandably so. In this one, I don’t know, he seemed to have lost his intelligence all together in favour of the “check out the wacky, hallucinating pirate!” gag. If they hadn’t brought back Barbosa, the pirate-y aspect of this movie would have really sucked. And that’s a problem, considering this movie is part of a franchise called PIRATES of the Caribbean.
09. So… basically Calypso’s revenge is to give everyone crabs? o_O
10. And the award for Greatest Misuse of James Norrington and then Randomly Killing Him In an Unsatisfying Way goes to … this movie! What the hell, that was lame and boring.
11. Shipwreck Cove is actually an Ewok village, FYI. Somewhere deep within, there is a droid who is fluent in over six million forms of communication and the Ewoks are preparing a feast of pirates in his honour.
12. There are obvious fantasmagorical elements of this film that are part of its internal logic, like undead pirates or men bound to an eternity of being covered in barnacales and becomming one with their ship, literally. Within the confines of these movies, it makes complete sense that some dude could have an octopus for a face, right? And yet the multi-Jacks and the Gulliver!Calypso really, really violate this internal logic for me. Partially because I thought it was lame — “We are unleashing the terrible fury known as Calypso onto our enemies… watch a she gets really tall and her voice gets deep!” — but partly because it just doesn’t jive with the rest of the fantasy elements that we see.
13. Also, what’s the deal with the lame effects they use whenever a female character has to become powerful and scary and omg fearful? Because that awful voice thing they did to Calypso? That’s exactly what they did to Galadriel in Fellowship of the Ring and it drove me nuts there as it drove me nuts here. I mean really, people have been portraying women as evil and terrifying in their artistic endeavours for centuries and the best you can come up with is to put some lame voice-deepning filter over the actor’s dialogue? Please.
14a. Most pointless part of the movie? Keith Richards’ cameo.
14b. The best part of the entire movie? Keith Richards’ cameo. Obviously I’m biased, but I really, really did love that part. You have no idea how fearful I was, because who in their right mind would ever put him in a movie thinking he can act? But they took the right approach: give him very few lines and when he must speak, make him say something that he probably already said in an interview somewhere. The whole “It’s not about living, it’s about living with yourself” thing? That totally sounds like a catchphrase he would come up with and repeat ad nauseum in concert or something. [Everytime it's his turn to sing a couple of songs in a concert, he has a tendency to say "It's great to be here! But then again it's great to be anywhere" in a "haha, I almost died like a million times in the Seventies!" sort of way.] So that was okay. Plus, hi, KEITH RICHARDS IS THE KEEPER OF THE PIRATE CODE(X). Loved how he was like “While you lot fight about this, I’ll be over here writing myself a pirate tune on this here guitar”1 and when Barbosa (or whoever) said to everyone else “So what you’re saying is that you’re not going to keep to the code, is that it?” and you could here the twang of a guitar string breaking, it was priceless.
1That he later stole from the set, the ol’ pirate.
I think, though, that the funniest thing in the entire movie was when Jack said to ol’ Captain Teague “How’s Mum?” and all he does is hold out a random, shrunken-headed skull. OMFG I DIED. That is creepy, piratey true love right there, that is!! LKJASL:DJSADLJ SO MUCH LOVE FOR KEITH IN THIS MOVIE. Also: if the next film centers around the quest for the Fountain of Youth, then clearly Keith will not have another cameo. [I think more than one cameo on his behalf would be even more pointless than this single cameo.]
15. Ultimately, I didn’t like this one any less than Dead Man’s Chest, but I didn’t really like it any more, either. Dead Man’s Chest was over the top ridiculous and dumb, like X-Men 3, but it was really stupid in a fun way. At World’s End wasn’t at all stupid or ridiculous, but it also wasn’t very fun and I didn’t feel terribly invested in what happened to any of the characters. It sort of plodded a long until Keith Richards showed up and then plodded a long afterwards and just plain would not end. Sort of like Return of the King, heh.
16. Oh, also, how could I forget this? Elizabeth getting her Mel Gibson on at the end nearly killed me. “YOU MAY TAKE OUR LAND SEA, BUT YOU’LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!” It’s nice for the girl to get to make the big climacitc pre-battle speech, but at the same time I feel like the writers were doing Braveheart madlibs and just substituted in the word “pirate” everytime they were asked for a noun where the answer should be “Scotsman” or something.