Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Genre: DVD, Movies, New Movies
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Kevin R. McNally, Geoffrey Rush, Stellan Skarsgård, Tom Hollander, Jack Davenport, Naomie Harris, Chow Yun-Fat
Director: Gore Verbinski
Rated: PG-13
Review By:
Michael Dance
School:
NYU Tisch '07
Quote:
"...And hey, I met you. You are not cool." -Almost Famous
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Click here for our theatrical review!
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – 2-Disc Limited Edition
All great things must come to an end – at least, all massively profitable things. Unfortunately, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise seems destined to be remembered as, ultimately, creatively unsatisfactory, with more than a few similarities to the Matrix trilogy. Both saw first installments that were surprise hits and that immediately entered the pop culture lexicon – and both followed up with an elaborate plan to shoot two sequels back-to-back.
The problem with Pirates was that the script for At World’s End was barely started when filming began. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were still working hard to finish the concurrently-shooting Dead Man’s Chest, and thus only the vaguest notions of the third movie were known: Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) would be back. Part of it should take place in the Far East, so let’s bring Chow Yun-Fat in. Oh, and let’s see if we can get Keith Richards to cameo as Johnny Depp’s dad.
With the massive budget and enormous production and post-production team, just imagine what could’ve been done if filming had been delayed just enough to allow for a script on a par with the first movie, Curse of the Black Pearl. But when Jerry Bruckheimer decrees that you have to shoot them both at the same time, well, you don’t ask questions.
What results in At World’s End is a plot that doesn’t make one lick of sense. The first half hour or so, there are so many double-crosses and secret deals and backstabbings – all of which, curiously, don’t seem to amount to much – that you need a spreadsheet to remind yourself what everyone’s motives are. And the climax is a real head-scratcher – all the world’s pirate lords have gathered for a massive battle with the East India Trading Company, an organization bent on erasing piracy from existence, which has hundreds of ships armed and ready to take the pirate ships out. The good guys destroy exactly one of those ships. Then the rest of the ships turn around and leave. (Knowing that won’t affect your enjoyment of the film, I promise.)
If you ignore the actual plot altogether, and shove aside the This-Is-Mass-Cosumerism-At-Its-Worst rants that will begin to form in your head, the movie is not without its charms. Unlike my less-optimistic friends, I walked out of the theater thinking that the film was generally “not all that bad,” and watching it again on DVD, I was surprised how well my interest held up. The massive amount of eye candy – which includes both top-notch production design that imbues the film with a sense of wonder that the plot cannot and an
When I was a little enough kid, I would watch movies and find them dazzling even though I was too young to really understand what was going on. I remember seeing Back to the Future at age four and only picking up the most basic aspects: time travel, neat-o, crazy scientist, funny, THE CAR FLIES AT THE END HOLY COW THIS IS AWESOME. If you go into At World’s End with that kind of mentality – or if you’re a four-year-old boy – you just might walk away thinking it’s the best movie you’ve ever seen.
The special features on this “2-Disc Limited Edition” are plentiful. There are, mercifully, no commentaries, although the first disc does include a very lonely blooper reel, which for some reason was not put on the second disc with all the other special features. Those include a brief chat with Richards and Depp, a cheesy-fun history of each Pirate Lord, and two fully-finished deleted scenes, one of which in particular had me cracking up.
There are also numerous featurettes focusing on random parts of the movie – an “Anatomy of the Scene” doc that focuses on shooting the climactic maelstrom scene, a look at the complications behind the “mulitple Jack Sparrows” scene when he’s losing his mind in World’s End, a talk with composer Hans Zimmer about the song that opens the movie, and a few more, including a few easy-to-find Easter Eggs. Everything is, individually, fairly brief, which turns out to be a bit of a relief after watching a 169 minute movie.
I read an article one time that criticized Gore Verbinski, director of all three Pirates movies, for being one of Bruckheimer’s hired guns. That’s not really fair. It’s never more apparent than in the special features that Verbinski worked tirelessly for years as the head of this highly expensive franchise, and unlike Peter Jackson, he didn’t have any brilliant source material to fall back on. He had plenty of vision, and the ability to execute it – just watch the movie and see – it’s just something as simple (and difficult) as plot mechanics that brought the enterprise down.
Then again, if you combine the profitability – I was startled to learn that worldwide, this movie alone is the fifth-highest grossing film of all time – and the obvious hook in the last five minutes about a search for the Fountain of Youth, maybe it’s not the end after all. And ultimately my opinion of At World’s End is the same as the first time I watched it: maybe if they make another one, they could write the script beforehand
Movie Grade: B-
Special Features: B
Overall Grade: B-