I tried to make this coherent and well written and all that, but I’m afraid it is mostly just a cobbled-together mess. But I do have an excuse – I was excited, I was running on almost no sleep, and I wrote it over the course of six days of cleaning and packing. That being said, let’s get to the review, shall we?

I did everything I could to go into this movie with no expectations or any clues at all as to what was going to happen. I didn’t even read Draca’s non-spoilery review because I didn’t want to have any biases. I resisted the temptation to watch any trailers until I saw them in theater, nor did I watch any of the behind the scenes specials they played on television before it opened*. In fact, I didn’t even watch the first one for several months before it came out so I could distance myself from my opinions about it as much as possible**.

And oh my stars and garters, I am so glad I did. I may have been the only one in my movie-going group who liked the movie, and I might even have been the only one in the entire theater who wasn’t disappointed, but I thought it was fan-freaking-tastic! I haven’t had that much fun in a movie theater since the first time I saw The Road to El Dorado***, and that includes the time Larissa, Bridget, and I MiSTed Loser. The only movie-going experience since then that has even come close to being as exciting or as thoroughly enjoyable was Brothers Grimm. Oddly enough, no one else liked that one, either...

I am positively itching to read Draca’s thesis on the film, but I want to get my own thoughts down before I lose my initial reaction. I feel quite sure that I shall change my mind on at least one or two points when I read her write up, so I want this virtually unsullied response at least for posterity’s sake. I did read her original spoiler-less review after seeing the movie, but I don’t think it affected anything, and the post-viewing argument with my sister only solidified what I already thought. So this is pretty much pure, unadulterated Robin (though I will use some of Kelly’s complaints to help explain my own reactions.

Now, where to start? How about starting where my mother always starts: Who was in it? (Read: which one of my many heartthrobs is in it? Because apparently I only ever see movies if I’m in love with one of the actors. This is often the case, but certainly not always.)

The answer to this question is, as it was in Curse of the Black Pearl (CotBP), absolutely no one. Orlando Bloom has his moments, but mostly he just reminds me how much more attractive one of my sister’s friends is (he looks like a less-effeminate Will, basically). And the only other conventional candidate is Johnny Depp. Now, I am attracted to Depp...sometimes. He’s a chameleon, so only about 10% of his characters really do it for me. I am very much in love with Jack Sparrow, but what people don’t seem to understand – and maybe this is because I have a Cap’n Jack poster over my bed at school – is that it is a platonic love. Jack is one of the absolute coolest, most endearing characters ever, but he is not harem material. When it comes right down to it, I like my men clean-shaven, well groomed, and predictable; you can see that it would never have worked out between us.

As for the other actors, the only ones I even know from anything else are Bill Nighy, Geoffrey Rush, and Jonathan Pryce, and I’m not swooning over Davy Jones, Barbossa, or Governor Swann. I have swooned over some pretty strange characters in my time, but that just ain’t happenin’. I do love Barbossa to pieces, but, like Jack, I don’t love him in THAT way at all. We’ll get back to Barbossa and why I love him later.

For now, let me get to the point of all this: I came into the film with absolutely no “romantic” attraction to any character...but that may be in the process of changing. I’m not sure yet; it may be too early to tell – about a year to early. All I know is I had a serious “Aw!” moment when Beckett first told us that, right alongside Elizabeth and Will, Norington was being charged with aiding a pirate. He had been nice and noble and extraordinarily gracious, and it basically destroyed his life. Talk about your pathos... And then when he showed back up – and Angela can confirm this – I gasped, then started giggling...and I also realized just how truly gorgeous Jack Davenport’s voice is...and that he’s not nearly as old as he seemed in the first film (how the phrack can you be a commodore by your early thirties, I would really like to know). Anyway, where it was Barbossa who stole my sympathies in CotBP, it was Norington in DMC. This clearly leads to conflicts when we’re supposed to side with Will against both Jack AND Norington...

And while we’re on the subject of antagonists, I am so completely and utterly in love with this idea of shades of grey instead of good versus evil...and we have at least six completely different shades in these movies so far. Will is a Good-with-a-capital-G guy, to the point of being slightly naïve (more on this later). Elizabeth impressed me a lot with just how much darkness she wound up revealing – she’s capable of doing some really vicious things, but thus far she has only done them for the greater good. Jack is a pirate, and a relatively selfish one, but he is, as Elizabeth says, a good man when it comes right down to it. In the list of his crimes at the end of CotBP, he steals, he impersonates officers and clergymen, he swindles, but none of his crimes are violent. There are no charges of murder, rape, assault, arson, nor anything of that nature. Norington is capable of devaluing people to the point of having absolutely no qualms about screwing over anyone who doesn’t think the way he does, though I honestly believe he is a good man, too, he’s just a little desperate at the moment. As we saw with the whole engagement thing, he is able to set aside his own feelings, but apparently only to a certain point. I think that could be said of anyone, though. Barbossa is NOT a good man, but he has enough decency left in him to not kill Elizabeth when all he needed was a little blood. And Davy Jones is, as far as I can tell from one viewing of DMC, completely heartless in a very literal sense, though he apparently did have a heart once and is therefore not wholly evil.

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio are absolutely brilliant when it comes to moral ambiguity and turning traditional conflicts on their ears. El Dorado starred a couple of boozy, conniving con artists, Shrek was about an antisocial ogre and a dragon who rescue a beautiful (in some light) princess from the handsome (in no light) prince****, and Pirates shows you heroes doing less-than-heroic things, BRN officers acting like pirates, and some really vicious pirate dudes being almost nice. These guys are amazing.

The one issue I had with the film actually has to do with Davy Jones...and it’s not the accent, which did trip me up once or twice, I have to admit. Barbossa did not have a sob story before he became undead. He was a mutinous scalawag with little concern for anything but gold, power, and women. Oh, and apples, apparently. He does like those apples*****. I was able to sympathize with him, though, after his monologue about hunger. That heart-rending speech made Barbossa one of my favourite movie villains ever, and put Geoffrey Rush very firmly on my List O’ Actors to Watch Out For. Davy Jones, though... He actually loved deeply enough to sacrifice his soul to stop feeling. He was so desperate, he cursed himself. What Jones did parallels what Norington did in a way, only it was far more tragic. But I just didn’t feel it. Maybe it’s because we hear it from Gibbs instead of Jones (and isn’t Gibbs just a treasure-trove of exposition?), maybe it’s because Jones is heartless now, or maybe its because I understand feeling unstated, and I understand losing what you heretofore thought of as your identity as Norington did, but I DON’T understand deep, passionate love. I really just didn’t feel for Jones at all. I mean, he was neat, sure. The character design was utterly cooella, especially with the valve and his organ concerto and everything, but I didn’t have any real reaction to the character. He didn’t get my pity or my respect or even my terror, all of which Barbossa managed to evoke. His ship couldn’t even outrun the Black Pearl, it being the fastest ship in the Caribbean and all, so that little extra bit of danger was taken away, too. The only truly creepy thing about him was his control over the Kraken – that biznatch is scary in a very primal, nowhere to run, can’t do anything about it, it’s just going to EAT you sort of way. I just hope we get more of Jones’ backstory – from him! – in the next installment. And it’ll be fun to see what Barbossa’s been up to since CotBP... I assume that will have something to do with his having been to the ends of the earth.

Speaking of, as with Norington, I instantly recognized Barbossa’s voice and started giggling excitedly when he showed back up. Kelly and Angela both started whispering to me, Kelly saying, “Isn’t he dead?” and Angela asking who it was and why I reacted the way I did. Both of their questions made me pause and reflect. Barbossa is supposed to be dead, and I don’t usually like it when “dead” characters reappear. So why wasn’t I upset here? My initial thought was that I love Barbossa, so obviously I’m happy that he’s back. But that didn’t hold up because, as much as I love certain Battlestar, X-Men, Hornblower, and Harry Potter characters, I don’t want to see them again. They’re dead, and they need to stay that way******. But rules about death have always been more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules in PotC, and Tia Dalma had just informed us that it is apparently possible to bring back someone who flings himself into the maw of a kraken, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to resurrect someone who has only been shot.

This wound up being one of Kel’s main complaints about the movie – they just had to bring back all of the characters from the first movie. This is not exactly true; Gillette, Mullroy, Murtogg, Koehler, Barbossa’s Bo’sun, most of Barbossa’s crew, in fact, and, most glaringly (to me, at least), Anamaria were not in this one. Nearly everyone else was, though. It’s a valid point. Maybe it’s because I read a lot of Dickens, or perhaps it’s because I did not like the lack of Nightcrawler in X3*******, but it really didn’t bother me to know what was going on with almost all of the characters that I have known so long. I actually thought it was quite nice.

Kelly’s other main complaint was how long and improbable the fight scenes were. Apparently, she couldn’t suspend disbelief long enough to watch a movie about undead pirates without complaining about how implausible it is that Elizabeth was able to fight as well as she did. Maybe it is implausible, but I’d much rather see her kick pirate arse than whine and get tossed around like heroines of yesteryear. And the three-way sword fight really wasn’t any longer than the one between Jack and Will in the first movie...or between Jack and Barbossa, for that matter, and it was arguably much more fun. These movies just have long sword fights. Kelly’s beloved Princess Bride has one of the longest sword fight scenes in movie history (though it’s much longer in the book...), and she’s not complaining about that. And yes, I KNOW that Will should have been severely injured by several of his falls, but it’s a movie. A cartoony movie. Get over reality for a couple of hours and enjoy the damn flick.

I think I have determined through my chats with Angela and Kelly that the very things that made them dislike DMC are what I liked most. Kelly took it much too seriously, and I suspect that she was also hoping for a rehashing of the first plot. And Angela is used to rom-coms, so the fast pace, complex plot, and dark atmosphere threw her. Kelly claims that, while the first movie was “smart,” DMC was “over-the-top.” Over WHAT top? Cap’n Jack sailed right over the top and didn’t look back in the first movie. And I really do think that she didn’t find DMC as “smart” as CotBP because she didn’t catch it all and doesn’t believe that there’s anything more to catch. Hell, I’m still finding things in CotBP! These movies are thinkers, and they require you to stay on your toes throughout. I LOVE that. She also refuses to look at it as part of a whole, and keeps complaining about all of the lose ends and “plot holes.” She won’t give Ted and Terry the benefit of the doubt as far as further resolution and explanation are concerned. Rather than being turned off by the loose ends, I find them very exciting, as they give me plenty to ponder and anticipate for the next movie.

In the end, I think Kelly and I have agreed to disagree (loudly and at great length, true, but no longer with animosity or any attempts to convert the other...though I do think it will grow on her with further viewings). She has conceded that DMC is PotC’s The Two Towers – a bridge from the first movie to the third. While I think that is simplifying the matter, I do like the Lord of the Rings analogy, and I find it intriguing that I’m the one who really likes Fellowship of the Ring but thinks TTT and Return of the King would have been much better as one two hour movie about the Hobbits instead of two fourteen hour movies about epic battle scenes. I don’t care about Aragorn or Arwen, Kelly doesn’t care about Norington or Barbossa.

Other than complaining about how disappointing it was, the only thing that was even discussed during our initial post-movie debriefing (outside of my semi-cogent ramblings on about why the movie wasn’t a waste, of course) was The Kiss and its implications (see why I want to read Draca’s spoiler-y review so badly? I guess that’s what I get, though, for going with the same group who decided we had to see The Devil Wears Prada the week before). Honestly, that little development didn’t surprise me******** OR interest me all that much. Well, I say that, but I don’t entirely mean it. I am interested in the much darker Elizabeth that we see in DMC – she’s much more intriguing this way – and what comes of the darker Elizabeth, as well as Jack’s reaction to it, is very interesting. And I am also very glad that Rossio and Elliot are keeping up their habit of having the heroine NOT be a total idiot and not necessarily “giving” her to the conventional choice (see Shrek, and it could be argued that Chel going for the scrawny, cynic over the muscular, playful blonde was also pretty unconventional). Not that I have any doubt that she’ll wind up with Will, she’s just not entirely, 100% devoted to him just yet. She’s got a little bit of a distraction that she needs to get over – which she will – but things are not quite as cut-and-dry Elizabeth-belongs-to-Will as it seemed at first.

There was also a brief discussion about Will and his motives. Someone asked why Will would have agreed to go on the Quest to Save Jack at the end, and I jokingly said that we don’t know why he wants to go to the end of the earth – he might be hoping to foil everyone’s plans so Jack can never come back. I don’t believe this for a moment, though. And Kelly mentioned something about how Bill and Will managed to bond so quickly, but I don’t believe that they actually did. Bill loves Will because he is his father, and that’s what fathers who are also good men – which Bill obviously is, given his history with Jack and crew – do. But I disagree that Will made his promise out of love. He made it because it is the right thing to do. Will is altruistic to the point of being a little boring...and quite stupid at times. He’s very clever, but he’s also an idiot in the way that only a true hero can be. I don’t remember what was happening, but at one point I burst out with a “Gods, he’s retarded!” loudly enough for Kelly and Angela to hear me over the action. Any interesting little moral dilemmas Will may have had about being a pirate were apparently resolved, and now we’re left with a Lawful Good******** dingdong who resembles Carrot Ironfounderson with a less interesting past and not even the hint of irony that Carrot has. Maybe I’m missing something, and maybe we’ll get more insight into Will in the third movie. In fact, I’m sure we will. But DMC did not do much to develop his character – and he’s about the only one who got short-changed.

I did realize one thing about Orlando Bloom during the movie, though. It was a realization I had been on the cusp of for quite some time, but I really got it during DMC. Bloom may not be able to deliver a line of dialogue to save his life, and he may be kinda funny lookin’, but he is hysterically funny when it comes to physical comedy. He is a really good actor, he was just born about 75 years too late.

So, despite what my sisters say – and what the review in the local paper (that I haven’t read yet because I wanted to write this first even though I know I won’t agree with it and it won’t change my opinion a single bit) no doubt says – I absolutely loved the movie, and I am going to see it again before the week is up whether I have to go by myself or not. My only regret is that I knew too much going in, even as well isolated as I made myself. I saw the trailer when Maggie and I saw X3, and I think it revealed too much. Imagine how much more enjoyable that first shot of Davy Jones - or the first one of Bootstrap, even - would have been if you didn’t know what they looked like beforehand! Like Draca said about the first one, a lot of the entertainment came from the surprise of Captain Jack Sparrow and how very...Captain Jack Sparrow he was. The surprise of the cephalopod for a head would have been much more effective if we hadn't alredy seen it, and the discovery of the barnacles in the Pearl’s hold would have been a really cool moment if we didn’t already know why they were there (or at least know roughly where they came from).

The other thing I managed to spoil for myself was Bootstrap’s presence. I had already determined from the first film that he should still be alive, and I was going to be very upset if that didn’t come up at some point in the proceedings, but I wouldn’t have expected him to be a main character if I hadn’t gone on IMDb to find out who the heck it was playing Davy Jones. After I tried so hard to avoid all spoilers, I went and ruined that one myself, and I very much wish I hadn’t, because that would have been a real surprise.

Kelly seems to think it would have be neat if they took a page out of Princess Bride’s book (or Batman Begins’, though she would never admit to liking anything about that movie) and have Bootstrap turn out to be Davy Jones. I disagree. By all accounts, Bootstrap is a loyal, honourable, and above all, good man. We’ve heard it, and now we’ve seen it. Besides, I don’t care what the sociologists say; nature has a lot to do with who we are. Boostrap may not have raised the recklessly self-sacrificing little idiot who is his son, but he sure gave him half of the genes that had the capacity for that kind of behaviour.

I only have a couple more quick comments, and then I need to wrap this up. First of all, what the heck is up with the composer switch? They use Badelt for CotBP, then earn enough money from the first to afford his teacher? Is that what that was? But Zimmer only wrote another theme or two**********, then yoinked the score from the first for the rest...and they didn’t even credit Badelt in DMC (true, Badelt yoinked a tiny bit of Zimmers TRtED score for CotBP, so I guess it’s only fair). This is going to drive me bonkers when I get the soundtrack and try to organize my CDs – DMC is going to be at the end with The Lion King and Prince of Egypt, while CotBP is towards the beginning. I suppose I could alphabetize them by album name instead of composer... And they were at least nice enough to make the movies alphabetical (Curse...”, “Dead...”, “Ends...”), so that won’t be a problem (is this not just pathetically Monkish?) Anyway, none of this is a problem until I actually buy the soundtrack...and that won’t happen until I know where the phrack to have Amazon send it.

On a completely unrelated note, did anyone else expect Jack to have to pull on a stuffed alligator’s tongue to talk to Tia Dalma? I really seriously cannot get over the Curse of Monkey Island resemblances (though none of the characters is anything like Guybrush... But Pintel could be Murray, aside from the whole having-a-body thing...)

I also can’t get over the fact that we finally got to see a little bit of the Caribbean. I am so used to British people on boats being BRN officers during the Napoleonic War, so I tend to forget during CotBP that they aren’t in the English Channel or the North Atlantic or the Mediterranean. But you know exactly where you are in the second, because you actually see a few natives. Of course, most people picked up on the setting from the TITLE OF THE FILM. I’m just an idiot.

Finally, what’s up with Disney World changing the ride? That’s a classic ride! Rich Halke and J.T. Lambert were on that ride! But now future generations – the generations who will never have known Mr. Rogers or cookie-obsessed cookie monster or musical Disney features – will think that the movie came first. I do have to admit that seeing Johnny Depp examine one of the animatronic Jacks was very humourous, though.

I absolutely adored the movie, I really did. Will future viewings put a damper on some of my enthusiasm as I find more things to pick apart? Certainly. Will future viewings also give me more things to be excited about as I pick up on more subtleties? Of course. Am I going to see it again really soon? Definitely.

I was considering trying to see Clerks II, but I have decided that I want my last summer movie memory to be Pirates, so Randall’s just going to have to wait until Blockbuster gets a hold of him...or more likely, until Comedy Central whips him out for their Secret Stash.

Begun 7/13/06, posted 7/19/06

DMC Fit the Second
AWE Fit the First

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* In retrospect, I should have taped them so I could watch them later... ::sigh:: Maybe they’ll play them again someday... back

** Okay, you caught me in a lie. I didn’t watch it for months because a) I am an engineering student who doesn’t have time to really watch movies during the school year, and b) I accidentally left it at school when I came home for the summer. But the abstinence thing worked out really well in the end, even if it wasn’t intentional. back

*** Need I remind anyone who wrote that one? And do bear in mind that I didn’t see the first PotC in theater. back

**** I know that Shrek isn’t originally theirs...but they made it theirs, so it still counts, I think. back

***** I know I’m going to regret admitting this at some point, but occasionally when I see a green apple, I get a little choked up. Yes, I am very strange. It’s good that we established this early. Let’s move on. back

****** I will make an exception for the Battlestar character, but only on the condition that it is done the correct way. Fans of the show know what I’m talking about. back

******* He would have had an interesting take on the cure, I’m sure. And considering how unstable the little guy seems, he should probably be at Xavier’s School so they can keep an eye on him. back

******** I had been anticipating this little wrinkle since way back in the rum-soaked scene in CotBP with Jack’s Freedom Speech. I don’t know if I’m truly the only one who was expecting it (as everyone I saw the movie with lead me to believe) or not, but I apparently am good at picking up on these kinds of things. Maybe that’s because I have no delusions about fidelity (see also my prediction of what would happen between Daria and Tom, another pairing that I vehemently disagree with, not because I don’t like Tom, but because Daria does NOT need to be in a relationship). back

********* Dude, did I really just say that? Out loud? Man... Today I graduate to a higher echelon of dorkdom. back

********** Neat additions they were, though. I particularly love the addition of the organ to the instrumentation. It gives it a nice new flavour. back