Monday, July 10, 2006
Review: Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Introductions are very important and the beginning of this film finds a wedding ceremony abandoned by its guests as the rain destroys the feast. The bride, Elizabeth Swann, sits alone and miserable by the altar, while Slash plays an emotional guitar solo somewhere nearby. Then an army arrives. Then her husband to be, Will Turner, is arrested and sentenced to death by the East India Trading Company. Then she is too. Then we cut to a terrifying prison where crows eat the eyes of prisoners. Then Captain Jack Sparrow immediately breaks out holding a mysterious picture of a key. Then he is visited by the ghost (sort of) of Will Turner's dad who tells Jack that Davy Jones, the undead pirate, is coming to collect his soul by means of a Kraken. Then...
On and on it goes, introducing new elements every five minutes or so well into its second hour without explanation, development nor particularly obvious reason. Pirates 2: Bloated Corpse is striken with most of the problems beset by big budget hollywood sequels these days: unlimited money, relative freedom from the studios, vaulting ambition and spectacular greed all combine to create an atmosphere of 'more is more'. In this case we have two sequels filmed back-to-back that tell one over-arching storyline where every single character comes back, a dozen more are added, and all are given a character arc, a touch of tragedy (you know, for depth) a couple of action beats and a few one liners - even the key-holding dog.The problem is that focus and clarity is lost. It is only when Will's Dad visits Jack that what passes for the A-plot of this film begins, yet it is given equal weight as the prison (which we never see again in this film) and the young lovers' arrest (really only a means to get them back out onto the high seas (and to get them personally connected to the East India Trading Company (which is barely referred to again in this film as it is all set-up for the third (Jesus Christ you see how many brackets I'm having to use here?))) and is not even the A-strand of their personal character arcs (phew!)). There is no obvious through line to this film, just lots and lots of business. A such it is difficult to distinguish a throwaway line (like Jack asking why the rum is always gone), from a set-up for the third movie (The East India Trading Company), from a major character beat (Jack Sparrow not being able to read his compass). As such it all merges into one mess of 'stuff' that will pass before your eyes pleasantly enough but has no shape for you to grab a hold of. When everything is given equal weight, everything becomes weightless.
Hitchcock said that an audience that is confused is not emoting. He made sure we all knew that there was a bomb under the seat of the bus, even if the characters on the bus didn't. The audience spends a lot of time in this movie not knowing what the hell is going on- not helped by a decision to keep the purpose of the titular 'Dead Man's Chest' a secret for most of the film. If you do not know what is happening or why the characters are doing it, you do not know the criteria for success or failure, and so can not 'ooh!' and 'ahh!' in the right places.
Yet the film is loads of fun, and this is a positive review. There are several long sequences that had me giggling with joy, most notably the cannibal island and the fight on the island where the Dead Man's Chest is buried, and the film kept my attention for the whole of its two and a half hours.
It is not because of the consistantly fantastic special effects, as the Star Wars prequels are full of them too. It is not that it is awesomely made, although it awesomely is, as The Matrix sequels are also pretty nifty technically. It is because, despite of the bloat and the endless redundancies caused by the need to set-up the third film, it retains its sense of the ridiculous.Where those previously mentioned trilogies took themselves very seriously, this one knows that it is full of rock-star pirates and undead monkeys. The violence in these films can come over as mean spirited, yet this film is happy to have you laugh at crows graphically eating people's eyes and faces being ripped off by sea monsters. It is a testament to the film's infectious energy that the cannibal island episode is one of the highlights even though it (and most of the first hour, to be honest) could be cut without any great narrative confusion. Equally, massively distended sequences such as Jack being tied to a kebab and the three way fight on a water wheel, come over as joyfully over-the-top rather than cynically bloated.
There are attempts at seriousness, such as Will's father's damnation and slow, graphic consumption by a cancer-analogy, and the twists that happen in the last 15 minutes, but only watching the final part (currently titled At World's End) will tell us if they, and all that endless set-up, are deserved or just evidence of hubris on the part of the film-makers. Either way, this is something of a cheat though, as films should stand by themselves - having to watch nearly eight hours of piratey adventure to get a whole story gets us worryingly close to those turgid thousand page fantasy novels we used to read as teenagers (and don't anymore. right?).
Repeat viewings will tell if the shortcomings of this film diminish or magnify but, at the moment Dead Man's Chest remains a huge summer blockbuster that is actually fun - the very thing that summer blockbusters are supposed to be about but so rarely are. Dead Man's Chest is recommended to everyone save for that special brand of nerd that demands their fantastical hokum take itself deathly seriously.
Now, this review is my first and signals my joining the ranks of that most holy of breeds: the online film critic. I promise to sell out to the first person who posts a comment.
(Depp + Cthulhu) x Rum - Sex/Matrix Reloaded = Dead Man's Chest
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