See full version: Having watched the first three; Pirates of the Caribbean; films again after not having seen them in years, I think they don; t get enough credit
I want to make it clear that for the longest time I thought that two and three were terrible. I hadn't watched them in upwards of eight years. As such, anyone here who has not watched them in a very long time, I would as I said encourage them to revisit them with an open mind. It doesn't mean I don't value comments from such people. [links]
In short, I did not mind that it was complicated and long, because everything else made up for it. Nothing felt out of place, and overall, the fact that they managed to not only make an epic swashbuckling trilogy, but one that works, is surprising. more
If this is an opinion that crops up alot, I apologise, I had not seen it to be prevalent. I only posted this because I could not find such a discussion on r/movies.
The third film, once again, manages the transition rather smoothly, everything is just made a bit more extreme, a bit more magical. And to my utmost surprise, even though I went into the film expecting it to be inferior and overlong, I instead discovered that I was not only invested, but that this had indeed become epic in scale right under my nose. I realised that if the script was good and funny, the visuals were terrific, I was invested in the characters, then what had I been complaining about? Obviously the film is quite complicated and full of side-plots, but I had no trouble keeping up with them, after all, this was an epic, some attention is required. IMHO, the final battle was not a disappointment, nor were the conclusions of the character arcs. I found myself genuinely moved by Bill Turner's relationship with his son, the sword-fight wedding ceremony in the rain was bitching, and the weird Davy Jones/Calypso melodrama was, if nothing else, cool mythology. more
Dead Man's Chest is quite successful in upping the ante, twice the swashbuckling and twice the weird quasi-mythology (which we were able to accept very easily thanks to execution), we kept our characters interesting whilst establishing new ones that remain memorable (in my opinion). Not only in Davy Jones but Tia Dalma, Bill Turner, and Beckett. The imagery in the film remains nearly impeccable. What the film did sacrifice was the simplicity of the first one, and perhaps some of the dignity. However, it cemented itself as being very unique in cinema at the time.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was destined to be the biggest flop of 2003. Really Disney, you made a movie out of your own theme park ride? But as history showed us, the first Pirates – or more accurately, Johnny Depp’s career-defining performance – pleased many audiences. For slightly better and so much worse, Jack Sparrow has been holding the franchise together ever since. Gore Verbinski’s original trilogy is a unique triptych of blockbusters that are refreshingly ambitious given their origin and unprofitable genre. The series has long overstayed its welcome, but a few of its entries remain some of the most enjoyable, freewheeling blockbusters of our time. By now, you already know how many Pirates of the Caribbean movies are there. Today, we are going to rank the list of all Pirates of the Caribbean movies, ranked in order from worst to best.
Padded with lifeless action sequences and scarcely supported by its paltry collection of characters, On Stranger Tides foolishly placed Jack Sparrow at the center of everything. The fourth and most superfluous Pirates film attempts to echo the tone of the first film in its scaled back runtime and simplicity, but there’s nothing remotely diverting about the most dull and utterly forgettable film of the franchise. Almost painfully mediocre, Stranger Tides washes over you so feebly that upon rewatch it would be like you were seeing it for the first time.
Barely a lick above the series’ worst, the fifth and hopefully final film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is an exhaustingly insignificant entry and overcompensating proof that the series should have been left as a trilogy. With completely shoehorned cameos by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly, the movie tries desperately to make you care about anything onscreen by including the son of Will and Elizabeth (Brenton Thwaites) and the daughter of Barbossa (Kaya Scodelario) as surrogates for their fictitious forebears. The very familiar concoction of ghost pirates led by Javier Bardem make for somewhat memorable villains and the set pieces are back to Verbinski’s level of cartoonish delirium, but it’s all executed with about half the inspiration. As a fairly wretched sequel altogether, there should be no further tales after this.
At the risk of sounding like an auteurist, I honestly think it's the difference between having Gore Verbinski direct and having Rob Marshall direct: for even though the trilogy made under Verbinski's watch often went to some very airy and very stupid places, there was always the constant sense that the filmmaker was committed 100% to the bizarre energy of the scripts, treating the cartoonish adventures of Jack Sparrow with the logic and mania of a cartoon (the same mood, in many ways that he and Depp recently demonstrated in Rango) . Marshall, whose best work to date has been trashing the seemingly-untrashable musical Chicago, has nothing like that level of inspiration: his handling of the material evinces no idea clearer than "that's how they did it in the other ones", and instead of a baseline of absurd whimsy, there's just exhaustion, all over everything. At their most tedious and unpleasant, the other Pirates movies have all been energetic, but On Stranger Tides is altogether droopy; both in terms of its pacing, which idles along without any urgency, and leaves the shortest of all four films feeling much longer than its already indulgent 137 minutes; and in terms of its visuals, which are not half as glossy as anything previous in Marshall's career (he works here for the first time without cinematograpehr Dion Beebe, instead inheriting Pirates regular Dariusz Wolski), and suffer from being woefully underlit for most of the middle.
That implies a straightforward quest narrative, doesn't it? But On Stranger Tides is by no means straightforward; I'd be tempted to call it episodic, but even that would be crediting it. It's more like the story advances in chunks: here's the chunk where they're hunting mermaids, here's the chunk were Sparrow and Barbossa team up, here's the big fucking chunk with the British missionary Philip (Sam Claflin) and the imprisoned mermaid Syrena (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) play at being the romantic subplot, and prove to be even less interesting and important to the overall scheme of the picture, and to suck out even more air from the proceedings than the incorrigibly bland team of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley from the original trilogy. here
The plot advances, in essence, because it is made to advance, not because there is flow from one event to another. And though, in the most functional sense, there is a chain of causality underpinning all of it, everything still seems pretty damn arbitrary and laden with plot holes and obvious contrivances. For example, everybody in the movie but Jack seems to know everything about the Fountain and its absurdly arcane ritual, though where or why they would come into such exactingly specific knowledge is something the series' regular, writers Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, apparently don't consider interesting enough to address (fun fact: as "suggested" by an unrelated novel by Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides is the first Pirates movie without an original story. So to speak). Ideas like the notion that Angelica is lying to Blackbeard, are dropped minutes after they're introduced, the beginning is needlessly protracted involving all sorts of narrative red herrings - the "impostor Jack" mini-plot contributed nothing at all. And the rhythm throughout is brutally plain "this then this then this then this" plodding.. I would perhaps sum it up as a story being posited, rather than one being told; nor a terrifically invigorating story at that, lacking as it does the high stakes of even the worst films in the series till now - for far too long, there doesn't seem to be much of a motivation for Jack Sparrow to be involved in this story at all, a problem compounded by his repeated complaint in the early going that he has no idea what is going on. here
I think this is a telling anecdote: the night after I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, I found myself at a party with some other gentlemen who'd already seen it as well. "Wasn't it the worst thing ever?" one of them asked (no, but that's a forgivable response), and then the important part: "I didn't know until it started that the actual title was On Stranger Tides."
We could chalk that up to not paying enough attention to the marketing - or, alternately, paying exactly the appropriate amount of attention to the marketing - but it sums up rather neatly the degree to which On Stranger Tides doesn't really have any kind of personality or identity on its own. It's just "the fourth Pirates movie". Hell, I myself got confused, earlier in the same day, which entry in the series it was. They all tend to melt together after a certain point; that point, for me, is the end of the opening cannibal sequence in the second film, Dead Man's Chest, the last moment at which I felt like the franchise was meant to be entertainment and not product, though as in all things your milage may vary. Far be it from me to begrudge Disney the right to make money however they see fit, but if On Stranger Tides fills any kind of actual need whatsoever, I am not perceptive enough to spot it. Was anyone genuinely still foaming at the mouth for still more adventures with the increasingly played-out Captain Jack Sparrow, played by the increasingly resentful Johnny Depp? And if there are such people, can this possibly be the film they were hoping for?
Still, the film is structurally more sound than Dead Man's Chest or At World's End, lacking the same burdensome mythology and narrative dead ends (the false first act in DMC, the sheer multiplicity of conflicts in AWE, and the reams and reams of exposition in both), and it anyways answers my chief complaint about the third film: there's a lot more piratey action relative to the plot - the producers have acknowledged that it was a deliberately stripped-down attempt at returning to the simplicity of The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first and (by a hefty margin) best film in the franchise. And yet, that doesn't save On Stranger Tides from being worse than either of its immediate predecessors; or maybe I had better say, more disposable than either of them, though the chase through London is agreeably done (though replete with a stupendously pointless cameo from a distractingly famous British actress), and a mid-film encounter with an army of killer mermaids has plenty of the matinee-movie creepiness that made the first film such pip, even if it goes on a bit long. [links]
In "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," Calypso is an ancient Greek goddess of the sea. here
In a September 2012 interview with Vogue, Keira Knightley said this. She played the role of Elizabeth Swann in the first three films of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
Hector Barbossa's monkey also is named Jack.