ATTENTION: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT
I’ll be frank, the Pirates of the Caribbean saga has never been of much interest to me. Yet, despite this, I tried to go into my local movie theater with an attitude of optimism and unbiased-ness. It was undeserved.
As promised in the title, the new waters in which this movie treads are indeed even stranger than the previous premise. I thought it was bad enough when there were curses on Aztec gold and fish people with octopi for beards. Yet in comparison to this stand-alone horror, all of that seems very logical. First, I’ll try to sum up my critique in one phrase, and then I’ll give the full rundown of problems. The error in six words: Too many elements, not enough explanation.
Ok, so you’ve got Jack Sparrow, Mr. Gibbs, thankfully William and Elizabeth have been cut out, and old Barbosa from the old series. So what are these new elements I speak of? Let’s see, there’s Blackbeard, Jack’s long lost girlfriend Angelica, the king of England , the collective country of Spain
And you know, none of that would actually bother me much if I got so much as an ounce of explanation about any of it. For instance, I never got to learn how or why Blackbeard had voodoo powers or could telepathically control the ship’s rigging. I also never learned:
-how the black pearl and other pirate ships could be fit into teeny glass bottles
-why the heck the Spanish would destroy the fountain instead of use it.
-who the heck gave Blackbeard the prophecy he’d be killed with a guy with one leg?
-why did Jack leave his old girlfriend abandoned on an island? Was there a point to this?
-what the heck ever happened to the missionary in the end. Seriously, did the mermaid drown him or did they live happily ever after???
Oh, the list goes on and on, but the point is that, I suppose, the audience wasn’t supposed to care about these things and just learn to accept them. Either that or the screenwriters didn’t review the story enough to realize how many loose ends there were to tie up.
I suppose though, at this point my negativity has gone on long enough. Despite the overall vertigo the movie caused me, there were a few mentionable upsides. For one, I was rather taken with the soundtrack of the new POTC movie by Hans Zimmer. While the soundtracks for the first three movies remained more or less the same stagnant melody, there were some noticeable embellishments this time. Most of the songs have been remixed, often with a little bit of a Latino flair reflecting on the new character Angelica. On the whole it seems to me like some of the best work he’s done in a while.
The other noteworthy adornment was the graphics. Sure, the CGI does not perhaps rival the other great works of this decade like James Cameron’s Avatar, but nonetheless it deserves some credit. I was very taken with the mermaids in this movie. Yes, they were bloodthirsty savages for the most part, but due to the attention to detail in the makeup department, they actually came across to me as being part fish rather then being pretty women wearing zip-on fish tails. One of perhaps the oddest details of the movie for me to pick up on or be impressed with was the fact that after they had one mermaid in a sort of makeshift fish bowl for a few days, the water actually got dirty and foggy looking like a real fish bowl would. It’s odd to me that some of the most minute details like this were taken into consideration while some of the bigger questions of the movie were lost, but I won’t deny that this one’s an intriguing watch. On a scale of one to ten, I’ll give this one a five.
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