I was the only one who stayed through the credits - which began to seem interminable at some point, but I pressed on - to see what came at the end. Haven’t they learned? This is the third installment in the series, and there has been something at the end of the credits of all three movies! Oh well...
We thought Spider-Man 3 would be the last movie we squeezed in before the arrival of little Jackson Scott Peddie, but we were mistaken. We had time for this one, too, and I’m glad that we did, because it is likely that we would not have seen this one for who knows how long if we had waited for the baby to come. Both Amy and I have enjoyed the previous two films, and I was sort of hoping against hope that this third installment would deliver better than the reveiws had suggested that it would.
And for a wonder, it did. Like the other two franchises that churned out third installments this summer (Spider-Man and Shrek), the Pirates film was said to be less enjoyable than the previous films, and has also been accused of being a complete mess in the story department - verging on the incomprehensible and incoherent at its foggiest points. The general consensus, then, is that these are three franchises that started out well but have reached the point that they are now doing little more than treading water.
I haven’t seen either of the Shrek sequels, and I have made plain how wretched I thought the third Spider-Man picture was; but I enjoyed this third installment of the Pirates saga - possibly because my expectations were somewhat low, but more likely because I knew going in that this movie wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, wasn’t going to try to be more than it is. It’s big summer popcorn fun, to be sure - but for the most part, it works.
One of the reasons that it works is because the characters are so fully realized - especially Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Captain Barbossa. Though pirates and scoundrels all, these three men are all possessed of a certain type of honor, and they hold true to themselves. The story operates within the framework of classical mythology - these pirates exist in the real world, but in a lot of ways, they exist in their own, separate world, too.
The two captains, in point of fact, have by the end of the third film been elevated almost to the level of gods, as the mythology of the pirate world is revealed and more and more of the history of the characters is shown. Like The Lord Of The Rings, there is more going on in the back story than we know - and it is the prerogative of the filmmakers to parcel out this information as they see fit. From an objective, obvious, point of view, this serves to leave things open at the end of each film for a sequel to emerge. However, from a somewhat more subjective standpoint, this type of storytelling also serves to effectively extend the dramatic tension, an important narrative element that Sam Raimi and company could clearly take a lesson from.
The lingering problem with the Pirates franchise, however, is how silly it plays. There is an element of reflexivity at work here, of course, but the tongue-in-cheek humor that worked so well in the first film is, in fact, a bit tired at this point. All of the facial expressions and gestures in the third movie look almost exactly like the ones from the first movie.
On the one hand, this is not a surprise - it was those expressions and gestures, that tongue-in-cheek hilarity, that helped to make the first film such a surprise hit. But there’s the rub - it was a surprise. In many ways, the first film seemed to work almost because it wasn’t supposed to work. That kind of amazing and unanticipated charm simply cannot be revisited in subsequent installments, no matter how hard the filmmakers try.
Unfortunately, they try a bit too hard to recapture that spontaneous silly factor that made the first film so charming. There had to have come a point during the development of this franchise when the filmmakers were faced with a fork in the proverbial road - focus on the silly humor and keep the movies light, or focus on the meat of the story and attempt to pilot a standard summer blockbuster through the dark waters of what is really going on with these characters.
They chose the silly route, but they have done good work with that choice, and have crafted movies that can be watched and enjoyed over and over again. They are good films, but one wonders about the choice made at that fork in the road - because it is quite possible that, in the right hands, these could have been great films.
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