Life has sucked lately. Even in getting to go to Maryland and spend time with my simply magnificent friends, it sucked, given that the Maryland trip was book-ended by visits to my grandfather, who makes Trevor Resnick look robust *. That's why the mad obsession with Doctor Who lately – it's an extraordinarily comforting show that is both extremely dark and manically cheerful. I come to it trampled and in pain, and I can relate to the heartbreaking sadness inherent in the show, but then The Doctor administers his own particular brand of morphine, and I'm able to keep going for awhile.

I removed myself from the show for the entirety of my trip, hoping to get The Doctor out of my mind and let the pain come back in full to be assuaged by PotC when I finally got an opportunity to see AWE, since those films had also proved amazingly good for my soul. I did everything I could to prevent spoilers – I avoided the IMDb page, turned off the telly any time there was a preview, and would have stayed away from Draca's blog even if I had been in a position to check it following the movie's release. I came to it as spoiler-free as possible. But there was a problem. My trip prevented me from gearing up properly – I had planned to watch the first two movies, along with a few other piratey films, listen to the soundtracks ad nauseum, play Pirates! Gold and/or Monkey Island, and just generally immerse myself in that world. But I didn't get to, and when I got through the graduation Friday night, the deathbed-sitting on Saturday, the Sunday car trip, and the Monday tea party/sleep over to finally make it to the Tuesday night trip to Apex Cinemas, my brain was still very much Doctor-addled.

I liked the movie, but it just sort of slid off my back. CotBP wormed its way into my brain somehow, and DMC energized me, but AWE was just there. I ran home and started writing after I saw DMC, but now I'm sitting here staring at a Word document and instead of filling it with excited ramblings, I find myself wanting desperately to watch a Doctor Who. I NEED my Doctor because PotC just didn't quite do it.

It's not that I'm disappointed or upset or anything, I'm just not... Well, I'm just not. Not anything. I mean, I'm still thinking about things – I have three pages of notes written as a basis for this thing – but it's really more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral reaction to what should have been my favourite movie of the year. I wasn't really moved by anything this time around, and that's a major problem. I'm almost certain it's a problem of my own and not of the movie, but the problem does exist, and it's a big one. I'll be going back whenever I can convince my sister to go with me again **, and I am fairly confident I will be able to react more appropriately to it if I approach it from the direction of someone who already knows the plot and can now pay attention to the movie. But for now, I can only say that the movie was well written and very well executed.

Well, that's not all I can say; as you are about to witness, I can say much more. Because I'm just not feeling it, I think I'll just type up my notes for this first go-round, then spend the rest of the night satisfying my Doctor Who addiction.

Oh, how I wish I could be jazzed about AWE...

~ I like that it wasn't a happy sappy ending. I know that a lot of people – including the majority of my friends – have a problem with this aspect of the movie, but it makes it more mythological, more like a Grimm faerie tale, and I like that. This isn't Disney's Little Mermaid, but it's not quite Hans Christian Andersen's, either. It's sad, but it's so much in keeping with the overall tone of the series that it's not out of place in the least.

~ Elizabeth got shafted. She's now a single mother and utterly alone in the world otherwise, as her parents are both dead, her husband is undead, and all of her friends are pirates. That was not a good time to be in that situation, particularly considering she was also scandalized by being a former Pirate King. Also, does anyone really believe the kid is Will's?

~ Jack was almost exclusively comic relief here, and that upsets me a lot. He only got a couple of opportunities to show off his particular brand of intelligence, and I didn't come out thinking "Jack is AWESOME!" like I do after watching the first two movies.

~ I did, however, come out thinking "Barbossa is AWESOME!" and I am now absolutely convinced that, should anyone ever make a big-budget Discworld film, Geoffrey Rush seriously needs to be Ridcully. Seriously.

~ The thing I came out saying – and, in fact, what I was thinking the last half of the film – was "::wail!:: NORRINGTON!!" The jury came back with the decision to put him in my harem only seconds before It happened, so I was not at all happy, as you might imagine.

~ Will is so totally NOT boring. He's still not my favourite by a long shot, but I respect him far more now than I did after DMC. I'm a tiny bit disappointed he didn't yell at people, but I will take what I got and be thankful for it.

~ There was a bit too much cutesy animal stuff. In the first two movies, Cotton's Parrot and Jack the Monkey served their purposes and then got out of the way, but AWE had several instances of the typical wise-cracking Disney sidekick schtick, including the bit that Jack stole directly from Mushu (though I do think it's a bit humourous/characteristic of the series that the same thing that was used in the finale of Mulan was only exciting and climactic enough to be in the beginning of AWE.)

~ Captain Chevalle was so totally Captain Rottingham. There have been a lot of Monkey Island similarities over the course of the series, but this is the one that made me not just point at the screen and giggle but raise my eyebrow suspiciously.

~ I just flat out didn't follow this one as closely as the first two. If I had been in the same frame of mind as I was when I first saw DMC, I'm sure I wouldn't have had any trouble, but I'm still rather confused on a few points. That having been said, my favourite thing about the series remains the moral ambiguity and all the confusion and everything. Ms Gibson (my 12th grade English teacher) and I had a disagreement on the relative merits of various pop culture phenomena the afternoon before I went to see AWE, and I realized after seeing the movie the argument that I should have made: PotC is better, at least in my opinion, than franchises like LotR and Harry Potter because there's no clear-cut right and wrong. With only one or two exceptions, you know exactly who to root for in LotR and HP, and there really is very little question about who is morally justified. In PotC, it all comes down to personal taste when you start trying to side with characters...and there are more sides than there are characters, in the end. It's so much more interesting that way. I mean, we all know that Evil will be defeated in Harry Potter, regardless of who has to die for it to happen, but even now that we've seen AWE, do we know the status of Evil in the Caribbean? Of course we don't, because we don’t even know who Evil's minions are!

~ What the heck happened with the whole Calypso thing? I mean, she just sort of turned into crabs, and suddenly Charybdis was in the middle of the Caribbean, too, and that was that. I guess it's in keeping with the rather unpredictable, aloof nature of deities – particularly ocean deities – for her to have just unleashed unfocused anger (but not quite fury) on everyone, but narrative causality dictates that, if you introduce a vengeful goddess in Act II, you'd better let her unleash seven kinds of Tartarus on the heroes before the finale, and that really didn't happen.

~ I almost felt sorry for Jones there for a moment when he was crying, but it didn't quite happen.

~ Speaking of feeling sorry for people, NORRINGTON! He didn't have anything in the end, not even dignity or pride or ambition or anything. He was a fantastic character, a (mostly) good upstanding man, and he spent his last days acting as Beckett's ankle-biter. The fact that he was all noble and stuff in his last moments hardly makes up for that, and in fact just makes me all the more upset.

~ I'm so glad they didn't make a big deal about Jack's dad and that they only gave us a tiny (and all the more enigmatic) hint as to his background. Well done, guys. Really well done. Thank you.

~ There were very few truly memorable scenes this time around (Jack's delusions, Barbossa's marriage ceremony, and Norrington ::wail:: dying were the only ones that immediately spring to mind when I think of scenes from AWE that elicited strong reactions from me), and there wasn't nearly as much truly fantastic dialogue, but it was still a solidly good, entertaining movie.

~ Critics and sisters and whathaveyou can think whatever they want about the movies, but one thing they can never accuse them of is being formulaic or reusing old material. I thought the distinct difference in tone and purpose and style between CotBP and DMC was because there was so much time between them, but that's obviously not the case at all. It's like three entirely different sets of writers and directors created movies with the same characters.

~ I really, really miss the "That's interesting"s, but tying the story back to Singapore was a nice touch, and I appreciated the minimal use of rum and eunuch jokes...even though that seems to mostly stem from the minimal use of Jack.

~ Jack the Monkey was never really made un-undead, but they didn't do anything about that. I don't know if there was any point where he was shown in the moonlight – I wasn't really paying attention at the time – but he should have been juicy if he was.

~ I totally called it on Will's "touch of destiny" being something not so good. Also, all of the speculation about The Kiss that I didn't really even think about until everyone and their mother kept talking about it turned out to be a red herring. Not that I'm trying to rub in my superiority or anything, I'm just saying...

~ Okay, so there was one other scene that I really liked a lot – Will's tea party with Jones and Beckett was coolness the likes of which we haven't seen since Jack's applicious chat with Barbossa.

~ I had totally forgotten that I knew Barbossa's first name until Jack mentioned it. I have no idea where I originally heard it, as I have CotBP on tape and therefore have not seen any of the special features. Unfortunately, "Hector" doesn't really lend itself to any good nicknames, either, so it looks like I'm stuck with "Barbie" for the moment. If anyone has any better suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

~ Jack's thoughts on running away were a bit Rincewindish, I thought.

~ I found it kind of weird to suddenly be cheering on Barbossa's crew while they slaughtered uniformed soldiers instead of the other way around.

~ I am SO glad they didn't make Elizabeth some reincarnation of Calypso because that would have been uber-dumb. I was also worried for a moment that they would try the Anck-su-namun thing with her. Tia Dalma was a complete surprise, though. Well, I mean, I knew she was Calypso as soon as it became apparent that it was one of the characters, but I never would have guessed that's where they were leading us with the character up until then. I'm not sure I like her quite as much as a goddess as I did when she was just a neato voodoo priestess, but whatever. She's still pretty nifty. Also, again, I totally called it on the key to the movie being in her shack (I still want to know what Jack pocketed in there, though...)

~ My fears about the Tia Dalma/Jones affair were unfounded, and I should have known that they could pull it off without being clichι. My continued apologies to Messrs Elliot and Rossio.

~ Jack's psyche is both terrifying and fabulous, and I'm very glad to have been able to see a bit of it. Also, what the HECK is written on his back?

~ The Monty Python-esque duo of guards is back!

~ I totally did not expect them to let Will be undead, but I suppose I shouldn't have doubted them. They kind of avoided the issue in a big way, but suddenly it's Will, not Jack, who is The Doctor *** (though he is The Doctor in a completely different way than Jack was/is).

~ Jack's reaction when Will was stabbed was absolutely perfect and probably the best thing about the whole movie...and possibly the series. It was just perfect.

~ I'd like to stress this once again: ::wail:: NORRINGTON! We went through Davenport, AL today on our way home, and I treated the long-suffering Duckie to yet another rant on this topic. I swear, every freaking time I get attached to a character... I knew deep down the instant I finally fell all the way for him that he was doomed and that he would NOT get the opportunity to come back like the others have, but I was still hoping they would let him stab the heart and thus redeem himself. Of course, that penance would be far worse than death****, but at least he would still be around, you know...

~ Ha! Ragetti's eye! It's a good thing they never got to spend their treasure way back in CotBP, given they were going to get him a new eye, eh? While we're on the topic, I rather expected Jack's piece o' eight to be something else and was a bit disappointed when his tell didn't turn out to be a bluff.

~ Jack slapped Gibbs! Dude, don't abuse the poor guy; you'd be nowhere without him.

~ Barbossa finally used Pintel and Ragetti's names. It's about time.

~ The bath house stuff in Singapore put me in mind of Spirited Away...though it was much darker and in need of Chihiro's cleaning skills.

~ Why could Bootstrap stay on the Dutchman with Will but Elizabeth couldn't?

~ Would Norrington still be alive if Elizabeth had called out "Bootstrap" instead of "James"? Would that have sent him into that confused reminiscing long enough for Norrington to get to safety? Was Norrington suicidal enough that it wouldn't have mattered anyway?

~ Bootstrap went all Wyvern super fast there, too. Wasn't it supposed to take many, many years for that to happen? Or are people of milder dispositions more susceptible to becoming grotesques?

~ Jack says "Four of you have tried to kill me and one of you succeeded." Who was the fourth person? Obviously Barbossa, Elizabeth, and Will did, but who was the fourth? If we're including indirectly trying to kill him, didn't both Pintell and Ragetti try on a few occasions?

Overall, it was a good movie but not quite as effective as the other two. On first viewing, it was my least favourite, but I do think it will grow on me. I am sure it will grow on me. Because it really is a good story, and it wrapped things up well (even though Norrington is DEAD!). I actually think it (or rather I) would have benefited from a couple more months' wait, but it's not the movie's fault my mind is elsewhere at the moment. I just wasn't as pleasantly satisfied or excited at the end of it, and that’s why I feel so blah about it.

Alrighty, I've said my piece. I'm gonna go check out what Draca has to say, now.

Also, I still have a few more things to eventually say about DMC, but that fit will have to wait a bit longer.

Begun 5/30/07, posted 5/31/07

DMC Fit the First
DMC Fit the Second

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* For the love of anything, people, brush your teeth and don't smoke. Though neither of these things is the cause of my grandfather's impending death, his trake and lack of teeth make him far, far more helpless and infirm than he would otherwise be. So, for the sake of your loved ones who will one day nurse you on your deathbed, take care of yourself now. back

** Given I know absolutely no one within 300 miles, my dad can't be in crowded areas, and my mum doesn't like the movies, it's going to have to be my sis, even though she's not going to want to go. back

*** I'm well aware that only Draca and Captain Chaotica!! know what I'm referring to here. I am quite comfortable with this, considering they're probably the only ones who will ever pay much attention to all this babbling, anyway. back

**** Here I go again, referencing something that was discussed in a private communication about Doctor Who. Sorry. I'll try to be good. back