Arrrrrrrh Wars

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END

Directed by Gore Verbinski
Screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio
Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, Chow Yun-Fat, and Geoffrey Rush

Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown
May 25 2007

"Are there pirates? Is the Pope Polish? You bet your sweet ass there are pirates. There are pirates overflowing every single frame of this movie. There are good pirates, bad pirates, friendly pirates, sexy pirates, sleazy pirates, clever pirates, stupid pirates, tall pirates, midget pirates, men pirates, women pirates, monkey pirates, white pirates, black pirates, and just when you think you've seen all the pirates you can stand, there are zombie pirates." - from my review of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

This is the best fucking movie I have ever seen.

Okay... let me see if I can explain that without sounding crazy:

There is a small war ongoing in head these days about what film is actually for. This began a few years ago when I wrote my review/appreciation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was the first time I was forced to wonder: "I know that film is supposed to be intelligent and meaingful and artistic and all that... but can't it just be like this instead?"

I am fully willing to agree that film does carry within it the ability to deliver sophisticated artistic meaning on par with the output of any other form. It does this supremely well; to me, perhaps, it does this better than any other art form ever has. However, I can't help but wonder if all of cinema wasn't actually just invented to make pirate movies.

An Au Revoir Les Enfants is a textual, lyrical, aesthetic triumph... but Pirates of the Caribbean is in its entirety something that could not be synthesized in any other medium, at all. In a time when the easy cheat is to wonder if the glory days of cinema are behind us, a film like this arrives and rides surfboard-style across the cresting wave of every technological advance that has brought the medium of cinema to where it sits right now - not sixty years ago, not a hundred years ago. Right now: an art form that matured to an unbelievable degree of sophistication, and yet is locked in such a pointless game of one-upsmanship that we as an audience stopped noticing just how fucking cool all this stuff has truly become.

I position Pirates of the Caribbean as the cinema's official response to our failure to see with better eyes.

Somewhere along the line, film garnered a history, and that history forced us to split the content between the art and the commerce, forgetting that the classics of history were, in their time, as crass and commercially minded as Pirates of the Caribbean is, right now. Our problem is that we keep insisting that film continue to be great in the same ways it used to be great, like berserker parents forcing the kids to be like Daddy.

There is something worthwhile about this thing here, right in front of us, and for what it is, rather than what it follows. It doesn't have to be like a great film from 1960 or 1990 or even last year. It just has to be the very best thing about this moment in time, and the very best thing about this moment in time is that 110 years of the development of film has lead us to the point where for two hours and forty-five minutes, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is every single thing that is great about its medium, and so much more.

We have arrived at the third part of the ongoing lore of the Caribbean pirates (snurfle snurfle), the likes of which never sailed any sea or hijacked any ship, but whose common inherent mythology is now writ so large that school teachers will have a hard go of it for years when it's time to convince the youngsters that pirates didn't actually sashay. As introduced in COTBP, we are in a quasi-mystical universe that is full of sea monsters and gods, undead pirates and squid-faced devils. Into this fantasy wonderland are dropped Elizabeth, Will, Hector (!), and Jack, our heroes from previous installments, all of whom have Major Sequel Business to be getting along with.

At World's End is the third "third" to come out in as many weeks in this Summer of the Sequels, and though I haven't bothered with the other two, I'll warrant that none of them were so enthusiastic about the requirements of their ouevre - the ouevre here being, "third films." At World's End is so intrinsically aware of its status as a third-and-final, that it plays like an unabashed love poem to every glory and pitfall of Third Film Syndrome.

They're a rare breed, third films, one looked on with almost unremitting contempt by the entire moviegoing public due to their frequent inability to live up to the easier dramatic victories of first and second parts. At World's End harmonizes the de facto elements of every closer from Return of the Jedi to Return of the King, from The Matrix Revolutions to The Godfather Part III, and if you think my examples are dubious, don't worry: I'm aware, and so are the filmmakers. We get all of the positives and all of the negatives here. The film takes forever getting in and forever getting out; it is virtually incomprehensible out of relation to the other two; and the entire first act is devoured by the process of getting one of the principals, Han Solo-style (Orpheus seems too far), out of hell.

Jack Sparrow, who began the second film in a coffin and ended it dead, having been swallowed by a giant fanged asshole, must be shepherded out of the locker by the same crew that put him in it. This time there's an almost cursory Macguffin related to the Nine Pirate Lords (of whom, inexplicably, Jack is one), who must now band together to fight the mounting threat to freedom on the open waters represented by Lord Cutler Beckett and the East India Trading Company. Who cares? Setup is meaningless; third films require a Pellenor Fields battle between good and evil, and whatever gets us from a dead Jack and a den in Singapore, to a hundred-ship gun battle and a maelstrom whirlpool in the middle of the high seas, is fine with me.

Are there pirates? Is the Pope Polish? (Uh, German?) You bet your sweet ass there are pirates. There are man pirates, woman pirates, dog pirates, bird pirates, monkey pirates, real pirates, imposter pirates, huge pirates, tiny pirates, mute pirates, sane pirates, insane pirates, Chinese pirates, Indian pirates, French pirates, Persian pirates, fish-man pirates, man-fish pirates, pirates who are part boat, living pirates, dead pirates, kid pirates, adult pirates, lord pirates, internal psychosis pirates, external projection pirates, lover pirates, hero pirates, villain pirates, trickster pirates, competent pirates, incompetent pirates, goddess pirates, Daddy pirates, son pirates, and when every single fucking pirate in the long history of pirateology has gathered in one place to talk about how they're going to continue to be pirates, there's even a rock legend pirate.

The machinery of the story is nigh-impossible to follow at this point, especially if you're not intimately familiar with the intricate workings of the prior two plots (quick: how does Jack get cursed by the Aztec gold in time for his duel with Barbossa but get un-cursed just as quickly when it's time to deliver the kill-shot?), but fortunately, we're into the territory of the story where this no longer matters. There's no single quest to be won here (Aztec gold / dead man's chest); there's just the future of pirating itself, and a big sucking vortex that does, indeed, pull all the narrative threads towards it like so many rubber duckies towards the drain. What is perhaps most endearing about At World's End, particularly in its final hour, is the degree to which it actually does achieve on the promise of capitalizing every single arc that screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have been carefully (and often, not very carefully) setting up for the past two and a half films. Chow Yun-Fat is sorely underused and the business of concluding Will's story is a messy one, but otherwise, it's all ship-shape in Bristol fashion. Fuck, the monkey gets an apotheosis in this movie. Who's complaining?

It's hard keeping this many balls in the air, but one last thing does become ultimately, brilliantly clear as World's End unspools: goddamned if this trilogy wasn't Elizabeth's story all along. The little girl who stood shivering on a forepeak singing "Yo Ho" three films ago has evolved into one of the most charismatic and multifaceted female heroines to grace the cinema screens (oh, and Sexiest Tomboy Beanpole on the Planet / nothing in the world I would not eat off her). She is Pirate Queen and warrior goddess; captain of the Empress (natch) and the Chinese armada; sword-wielding mama and wife superior, who takes her man for her own on the slippery decks of a ship funnelling into hell, and makes him return faithfully to her on the cliffside for a good rogering, even if it's only once every ten years.

Significantly darker than its predecessors, At World's End is also often surprisingly, achingly beautiful, as the travelling squad moves through landscapes fierce and dense, oblique and mad, through a world that is threatening to up-end them clean off the boat and into the wake of history. There is an awareness of this passing of an age that invests the story with unexpected emotion, where previously there was none. To mark the occasion, Hans Zimmer concocts a gorgeous counter-argument to the original Pirates theme, which fits on the musical structure like the tail fin on a Porsche - in other words very, very well, giving moment and lift to the always-zesty Pirates symphonics that serves to remind musically throughout that we are, truly, in deeper waters.

In many ways as a filmgoer I will spend the rest of my life trying to have just one more experience that makes me feel the way I did when I was a kid watching Star Wars for the first time, when (as legend now has it) I thought the Star Destroyer that opens that film was actually in the theatre with me, so transported was I by the fantastical work of human imagination on the screen before me. Maybe I'll never really be able to knock the Star Wars experience off the top of my "favourite films ever" list, but I will gladly say that for about ten or fifteen minutes last night, a single message went on an endless loop through the front of my brain as I watched At Worlds' End: "fuck Star Wars." At the very least, my Favourite Movie Ever will always stay a prisoner of its exact moment in time, while - as Pirates has so capably, lovingly, enchantingly reminded me again - film continues to sail forward.

I'll tell you my favourite scene of the movie, by way of closing. Jack and company have sailed out of Davy Jones' Locker at the end of the world and are trying to find their way back to the world of the living, but are becalmed and lost. Jack begins having a conversation - no joke - with two miniature versions of himself that dangle pestulently from his dreadlocks offering up catcalls. And then, he figures the way out... and without even telling anybody what he's doing, successfully gets the entire crew of the Black Pearl to run madly back and forth from side to side of the ship to create a rocking motion that will invert the Pearl in the water - the inversion of the real into the mystical, the leap beyond logic that is the province of only the true heroes, and the only way home. It's mad, all right - "mad like Jack," as they used to say.

If there is another scene in the whole trilogy that so perfectly demonstrates the beautiful madness, the delirious joy, that has been Pirates of the Caribbean, I don't know what it is. And I'm reminded of another thought from my viewing of that first film, four years ago: "I never want this to end."