Perverse Curiosity - POTC 4

I have not seen the new <i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i> movie. I liked the first film much more than I expected to but thought the last two were irredeemably dreadful. And judging by the early reviews I doubt I'll risk seeing this film while it's in the theater. But I do have a little kernel or perverse curiosity. Has anyone here seen this movie? Is it as bad as I expect or does it have some saving graces? I've heard that one of the pirates becomes a privateer in this movie and I admit that I have a twisted desire to see how terribly Hollywood can mangle the dynamics of that profession. I look forward to seeing if anyone has any feedback on POTC and am open to the possibility that it might turn out to be flawed but enjoyable like the first installment in the film series.

Haven't seen it, indeed I only saw the first one when it was aired on one of the main free TV channels a few days ago (presumably to advertise the new one). It was OK but can't say it enthused me to rush off and see POTC4.

Blog speculation I've seen indicates the critics have been pretty damming, but they were for 2 & 3 and a lot of the public liked them anyway. I guess it's a series you either like or don't.

Moved to The Maintop

It's not necessarily true that you either like the series or you don't. I liked the first one but hated the others.

I was in no hurry to see the first one when it came out. I figured that a movie based on a theme park ride was not going to be my cup of tea or tot of grog. That one pleasantly surprised me. It was incredibly silly, but it was actually pretty fun with some witty dialog and engaging characters.

So I went into the sequel with much higher expectations and found myself surprised again, but in the other direction. The plot was a banal kludge, the characters were inconsistent, the over-the-top Hollywood action and effects were over-the-topper, and the humor bar had been knocked down to the lowest common denominator.

I went into the third one hoping the second had been a fluke, but with a great deal of trepidation in case the exceptional episode in the series had actually been the first. And I very nearly walked out of that terrible and absurd monstrosity.

I found that the first movie was like a surprisingly good seapie of silliness, good humor, and schlock. The ingredients didn't necessarily all go together, but it worked. I mean as a fan of HNF I couldn't even tell when the first film was supposed to be set (late 1600s, early 1700s, 1720s, 1740s?). There was just too much conflicting evidence. But it really didn't matter, it existed in its own universe with its own rules. For the later installments they didn't even bother with their own rules. It was like they kept serving left-overs of the same seapie topped off with salt beef passed its prime. I'd hoped that when they returned to the world they would make a new make a new dish with the same recipe as the first but with ingredients that hadn't gone to the Caribbean and back three times already. However the scuttlebutt doesn't look good.

PotC 4 was terrible. Depp was neither funny nor charming, and I felt sorry for Geoffrey Rush (plays Hector Barbossa). Rush managed to bring a degree of plausibility to his scenes, thanks to his skills as an actor, but he was trapped in a horrible movie. You know a movie is desperate when it turns mermaids into aquatic ninja vampires.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine about the POTC series. And I tried to explain to her that, while fantasy elements are fun, that I really wanted to see a realistic pirate movie without all the krakens, walking corpses, and demigoddesses. I should have know better. She immediately objected saying that the pirates really would have believed in Calypso and that throughout the Caribbean they believe in her as a sea goddess to this day (and she should know, she insisted, for her mother is Cuban and her father is Bahamian). I carefully skirted the veracity of those claims about the cult of Calypso and stuck to my guns on the realism issue.

Explaining further, I said that it didn't really matter whether the pirates believed in something fantastic, just so long as the writers didn't put a real version of it in the movie. I said that they could have been Christian or worshipped Calypso, but that I needed neither a physical manifestation of Jesus or a 500 ft tall demigoddess in a maelstrom, providing a literal deus ex machina. I added that if it weren't a historical anachronism I would not mind if the heroes were pastafarian pirates, just so long as there was no actual Flying Spaghetti Monster in the film. At this point she finally got what I was saying and conceded the point. I should know better though than to try and talk sense when this friend takes the bit between her teeth for a sleigh ride through crazy land.

I know exactly what you mean. It cheapens the heroics when you know they can come back from the dead. I prefer non-magical sea stories, but I will allow magic within the realms of the period's limits. For example, I was okay with Jack's magic compass and Davy Jones/Flying Dutchman because those are elements that show up in sea tales, but the giant goddess (who didn't crush the ship and sink it with her weight) was just plain ridiculous.

We have, for example, sea songs like Keeper of the Eddistone Light who slept with a mermaid one fine night and produced some offspring, including a talking fish, but when the mermaid got seriously pissed off, she didn't suddenly grow fangs and start leaping through the air like a magic ninja.

I think one of the reason why I like the old-fashioned swashbucklers is that they ask us to believe in people, not special effects. Even when they are hokey and have anachronistic elements, the focus is on the character's ingenuity and efforts, not the special effect creators' ingenuity and efforts.

I'll cheer for Errol Flynn in "The Sea Hawk" and "Captain Blood".

I enjoyed the whole series. I didn't go to the POTC movies expecting anything more than what they served up--summer entertainment. I also LOVED "Master & Commander"...at the opposite spectrum from POTC in many, many ways (minus the ocean setting), of course. I went into that movie for an entirely different experience than what I went to POTC for, and M&C delivered on all fronts (and I hadn't even read PoB's books yet at that time).

While POTC certainly is not historically correct in nearly any way, the first movie certainly aroused an interest in me to learn more about pirates, sailing vessels of the era, and the history of the late 17th century/early 18th century. Not a bad thing. Perhaps others were also stirred enough to possibly pick up their very first Age of Sail novel and become hooked like us.

I do admit to having enjoyed the first one, for very much the same reasons you cited. It was fun! Sure, it was a struggle at times to keep from thinking "ridiculous!", but at least in the first episode those moments were fewer.

Keogh, I have nothing against the first movie, it was honest fun in spite of any reservations I had coming in.

Bob, here's why I think the subsequent movies failed so horribly. I think that the first film's strength was that they had some great characters and dialogue. The subsequent movies failed because they cranked up the silliness, changed the wittiness/physical humor ratio, and didn't keep the characters fresh yet internally consistent. Plus there was some attempt to stick to a reasonably character-driven plot that made some kind of sense. When they changed these aspects it left us with a a series of hollow, lowest common-denominator drivel.

I can't argue with any of that. I watched the trilogy but with decreasing enjoyment for each one.

I started out with low expectations for the first one, ended with high expectations for the sequel which were not met. I revised my expectations down for the third one, but still didn't get them low enough. I figured I had to get my anticipation to dentist appointment or possibly mugging level before the fourth one, and decided that it wasn't worth the effort to limbo that much!

But let's stop being so negative. What are some of the best pirate movies?

Errol Flynn's Captain Blood is pretty much the epitome of the genre for me.

There are oodles of adaptations of Treasure Island (even a Muppet version as well as a sci-fi "Treasure Planet"). I haven't seen them all, but the Disney '50s one is classic and the '90s one with Charlton Heston as Silver was surprisingly good. It didn't have a huge budget, but they did a really good adaptation of the novel.

I found The Buccaneer (1938) to be a surreally weird version of Lafitte, but I liked this movie anyway. The whole film seemed to have tongue firmly in cheek.

Against All Flags was not a particularly memorable Flynn outing, but it's fun nonetheless.

I had high hopes for Cutthroat Island, but I think it singlehandedly killed the genre until the 2000s revival with the POTC franchise. That being said, I still kind of liked it.

I think we saw the same thing in Pirates of the Carribean as we saw in The Matrix. Namely, that a plot element that is cool and fantastic when it is vague becomes silly as they center more and more of the film around it and try to define it.
We see a similar silliness in the Star Wars prequels and midi-chlorians, micro-organisms that allow humans to sense the force.

That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Please Lord, give me strength. This board is like crack. I just can't get away from it!

The first PotC film was, I admit, fun. It wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was fun. The ships were worth watching, even the rather overdone barge top replica of the Victory. Depp was amusing, Knightly was decorative and Legolas was, well, Legolas. (My daughter just chimed in saying that Legolas was decorative as well...she is 16, after all). Rush was simply superb.

Then came the next two. Good lord, what bad rubbish! I still haven't managed to get the smell of putrescent nonsense out of my nostrils! Ugh!

As for #4...maybe on TV late at night when senility has finally crippled my will. Maybe.

Okay. I actually like Cutthroat Island. It's hokey, it's over done, it's as historically accurate as Monty Python's recreation of Pearl Harbor, but it was done with a sense of fun that made me think of Scaramouche or the Prisoner of Zenda (did I mention I'm a huge Stewart Granger fan?)

Flynn was, well, Flynn. That pretty much says it all. Always worth the time!