The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Oh, right, I saw the new Pirates like last weekend. That was a thing.

The first Pirates of the Caribbean is an amazing film. It’s flashy, it’s fun, it’s everything a movie that’s trying to just be flat-out entertaining should be. The rest of the forced “trilogy” were not that great (though a recent re-examining of Dead Man’s Chest by Essner makes him think that maybe we were being a bit hard on the second one in hindsight) and felt like they were just kind of shit out to rake in more cash. They were disappointing, mostly because they added a ton of magic to a setting that worked best as being “low magic,” and just generally shit all over everything that was fun by flooding the entire movie with pointless back story and lore. Also, there were a million nonsensical deals. All that wasn’t what I wanted. I was hoping that this new movie, divorced from the characters and all that bullshit, would go back to the fun of the first.

It kind of did, and it kind of didn’t.

The good parts are when Jack Sparrow is on the screen, and allowed to do his thing. He’s still a very entertaining character, and when he’s released from the chains of bullshit back story, characters, and scene ideas, the film is very fun to watch. Overall I enjoyed the film because of this, but it still left a lot to be desired.

Let’s start by talking about Blackbeard. When he walked onto the screen, I was hopeful. He seemed to have some sort of magical sword that controlled ropes. “Wow, what a cool, restricted magical power that is really powerful on a pirate ship! That should be interesting!” But no, it just controls the ship completely, a ship that shoots fire for no reason. He also has a zombie crewman who can see the future, but for no real reason. He doesn’t need to be any of these things. He also captures ships and magically puts them in bottles. Why? Nobody knows. It’s never explained. It’s a pointless fact. Finally, he also makes really, really stupid decisions for no good reason. He’s a pretty terrible villain. Pretty completely terrible.

Still, at least it makes sense that they’d try to have a villain. A movie needs one of those, right? But there are characters that make no sense, such as the priest on the ship. Not only is his character completely unrelated to anything at all, but his character is also incredibly stupid and annoying. So much time is spent with this guy and the mermaid he is trying to rescue, and for absolutely no payoff. The payoff is that he rescues the mermaid, who brings Jack Sparrow some magical goblets for no reason explained in the movie which she wouldn’t have needed to bring to him if the movie hadn’t manufactured an extremely artificial reason for the mermaid to bring them to him. Essner suspected that he was there to be shirtless for the ladies in the audience. He was fine-looking, I guess, but I don’t know why anyone would care for a character so stupid.

There were plenty of other ridiculous parts of the film too, such as Ponce de Leon being some sort of powerful Spanish Necromancer who fashioned magical Agua de Vida goblets required for a magic ceremony one can only do at the fountain of youth. Those were all the sorts of things I normally don’t care about if the characters and movie are fun. However, the film doesn’t really completely deliver on that. If you are a huge fan of Captain Jack, there is still probably something in this movie for you, though you could probably get away with renting it when it comes out on DVD. I really wish they could get this franchise back to what made the first one a shocking, amazing success though.