Movie Review - Pirates 2

I finally got to see Pirates 2 last night. It's been out for over a month, but I caught the last showing last night an hour after the boys went to bed. The movie is two and half hours long, so I didn't feel as ripped off as usual for paying 10 bucks to see it. Oddly, we still had to line up outside the theatre before we could go in, and our line was just as long as Snake on Plane, which was rather amusing.

The following will be full of spoilers as I comment about the movie itself. If you don't want hear it, don't keep reading. :)

First off, things I didn't like about the movie - . . . . . . . . .

There, now that we got that out of the way, let's go ahead and get to the fun parts shall we?

Here are some of the things I DID enjoy about the movie -

The music was tremendous. It blended the themes from the 1st and made all sorts of good new ones for this one. I really enjoy when composers take simple melodies, then pile on all sorts of counterpoint and enhance that with big, full soundings instruments. In this movie they take a simple musicbox theme, and then go to town with it on a full pipe-organ. It reminded me of stuff I would hear from the Ultima games. Just great stuff. I'll see if I can find an example of it to play in the background of this entry. Well done Hans Zimmer (who also did Batman Begins, Cool Runnings, and The Power of One).

The references to the first movie were hysterical and abundant. I really enjoy when any series will reprise certain themes over again (Star Wars is the best example of this), and Pirates does this in a purely humorous way knowing that it is not to be taken seriously. It's great! Here are some examples I can remember off of the top of my head:

'Ello Poppet' - Spoken threateningly to Elizabeth
'Still rooting for you mate' - Jack says to Norrington
'CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow' - used early in the movie and then all over the place later
A drunk being pulled from a well is from the Disneyland ride
The prisoners trying to coax things to them is back again
A good slap to the face by a busty lass is always a good thing
'Why is the Rum always gone' - The rum is kind of treated like its own character
Elizbeth's fainting spells return, but are much less effective this time. Still funny though.

I love it. The new additions of Davy Jones, Bootstrap Bill, the East India Trading Company, and even the Kraken are all very well done. There are some sequences with the Kraken that are clearly homage to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and they're an absolute joy to watch. THIS particular Kraken has a brain however, and learns from its mistakes, and will adjust its attack patterns next time to neutralize the thing that hurt it last time. There's something you don't see often from a Kraken!

Speaking of sequences, the 3-way swordfight is spectacular. I mean really, really impressive, and it goes on FOR EVER! Usually these things are too freaken difficult to do very well for very long, so they end them quickly (Yoda's fight with Darth Tyrannus and Obiwan's duel with General Grievious' 4 sabers leap to mind), but THIS one just kept rolling along for ages (ha-ha, get it?). My previous favorite swordfight scene was from The Musketeer, but this one tops it by a little bit on sheer difficulty. Both have excellent use of stunts, story, and props, but this one just edges the other out.

I also enjoyed the round of Liar's Dice they played, as I used to play this at camp years ago. Our version was very different and had a lot more rounds involved, but what heck. I had completely forgotten about that game and about that camp, so I enjoyed the trip down memory lane very much.

So, if you're getting the feeling that I enjoyed the movie, you'd be on the right track. I don't know what all of the critics were complaining about. They didn't like the loose ends, but I thought it closed them well enough for a movie that you KNOW going into it will have another installment. Comparatively, Empire Strikes Back was even WORSE for open ended story lines, and I don't recall there being any whining about that (of course, I was . . what, Eight years old then?).

I can't really compare Pirates 2 to ESB as far as structure, and ESB had a lot more spiritual overtones to it, and the closest Priates comes to that is Elizabeth's quasi-struggle with a love interest, and Jack's quasi-struggle to be a little less selfish. Neither of those struggle very hard though, and neither leaves the viewer in any doubt as to how they will come out. But then neither the movie nor those watching it really care, because we just want to see how it turns out.

That is the whole point of movies. We go there to get our fix of the storytelling tradition, and there's many different ways to tell a story. Pirates' method is to tell the story in THE most entertaining way possible, with lots of visual effects and laughter. And it is very successful in both areas.