Director: Rob Marshall
Writers: Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott
There comes a time when a character has run out his/her/it’s/undecided journey, and any further character developments have been exhausted. When the character has become so well defined, the writers simply don’t know what to do with them. This is the reason why whenever Morgan Freeman appears in a film, he is destined / cursed to narrate it. Any further developments can often lead to parody. Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the most well-recognised icons of latter times. Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides for this very reason lacks any conflict. With three films under his many belts, any further exploitations of the Captain just lack relevance. Captain Jack is at it again. By his very ambivalent nature the film lacks conflict. Nothing really phases the reluctant anti-hero. He’s there, but he wants to be elsewhere. People are yelling at him to do things, but he will always do something completely different. There is so little that matters to him that, as far as his character goes, the climax of the tension occurs in the first ten minutes, in which Captain Jack is denied his profiterole. Manacled to a chair, with it just out of his reach... The pinnacle of the film results down to Jack wanting a creamy treat, Jack being denied a creamy treat, Jack getting his creamy treat, and Jack eating his creamy treat. That’s the three-act structure done already, we can all go home now.
Writers: Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott
There comes a time when a character has run out his/her/it’s/undecided journey, and any further character developments have been exhausted. When the character has become so well defined, the writers simply don’t know what to do with them. This is the reason why whenever Morgan Freeman appears in a film, he is destined / cursed to narrate it. Any further developments can often lead to parody. Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the most well-recognised icons of latter times. Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides for this very reason lacks any conflict. With three films under his many belts, any further exploitations of the Captain just lack relevance. Captain Jack is at it again. By his very ambivalent nature the film lacks conflict. Nothing really phases the reluctant anti-hero. He’s there, but he wants to be elsewhere. People are yelling at him to do things, but he will always do something completely different. There is so little that matters to him that, as far as his character goes, the climax of the tension occurs in the first ten minutes, in which Captain Jack is denied his profiterole. Manacled to a chair, with it just out of his reach... The pinnacle of the film results down to Jack wanting a creamy treat, Jack being denied a creamy treat, Jack getting his creamy treat, and Jack eating his creamy treat. That’s the three-act structure done already, we can all go home now.
2 ½ / 5
I thought that a fourth movie in the POTC franchise was a bad idea. After seeing the movie, I'm sticking to my opinion. It wasn't a terrible movie . . . just disappointing. One, the movie tried to recycle elements from the first movie and I found myself rolling my eyes. Philip and Serena were no Will and Elizabeth. The magic of Blackbeard's sword was never explained. The Spaniards' role in the film seemed irrelevant. And as much as I enjoyed Jack's relationship with Angelica, the latter's regard for her father struck me as rather disturbing. She almost seemed like an 18th century version of Mildred Pierce - a woman obsessed with her father, instead of her child.
ReplyDeleteI agree entirely. The Fountain of Youth was just a MacGuffin. The most interesting part of the film was the mermaids, but they had absolutely nothing to with the overall plot, and seemed thrown in there just so they could include a romance. The Jack / Angelica arc was just irrelevant from the beginning, simply because Jack's character now is not really capable of giving anything back. He'll never change. We all knew it would end that way.
ReplyDeleteI was going to finish writing the review, but then I realised that it really was not worth it, having the TL;DR version there already.