FILM REVIEW – PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN THREE – AT WORLD’S END 2007. Disney.
For reviews of the first two films, see - Pirates of the Caribbean – The Curse Of The Black Pearl ***** Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest
I heard mixed reactions from people to third part of the Pirates trilogy, ranging from adoration to bitter disappointment. I have to say I loved it. The length of the film is necessary with so much going on, and there is a surprisingly downbeat tone for a Disney film, with several characters facing a less than happy fate. There is still hope for a fourth film though, but necessarily with everyone involved.
With Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow swallowed away by the Kraken and sent to Davy Jones’s Locker, a strange Limbo where you are confronted by yourself in a being John Malkovitch kind of way, the film begins with a desperate need to rescue him from the dead.
The need is due to a genocidal drive by the East India Company and the British navy to wipe out pirates universally. The mass hangings are in fact already taking place even as the new laws are being read out. Even children are executed. One child sings a mournful song, taken up by other doomed pirates. The song sings out around the World, and tells other pirates, including the freshly resurrected Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) that the pirate council (a Mafia like cartel of international Pirate Lords) need to be united to discuss plans for how to responds to such a grave crisis. Admission to the council requires on of none pieces of eight, and any dying pirate lord should transfer his piece to a successor. Depp has been taken without being able to commit to such a transfer so it is necessary to recover him from his doom.
To secure a ship, and crew9as The Black Pearl was swallowed
along with its Captain), Barbossa and Elizabeth Swann visit the Chinese Pirate
Lord Sao Feng (Chow-Yun Fat),
a treacherous, double crossing, rather humourless figure. He has already
captured Will turner (Orlando Bloom) who has made a desperate attempt to steal
his navigation charts.
A quite
brutal fight kicks off, but the pirates are united in an uneasy alliance when
the British attack, ad they realise that there is a traitor o both sides in
their midst. The main heroes escape on Sao Feng’s ship, and sail to the End of
the known World, through an Arctic or Antarctic landscape as the crew freeze –
one man horribly shattering his own frostbite encrusted big toe. They then sail
over a vast cascading waterfall.
The scene
now switches to Depp, in w his white landscape personal hell, trapped in an
endless crew of himself, arguing and often viscously killing each other. He is clearly barking mad now. He is clearly confused when an army of
crabs pick up and carry the Black Pearl across the sands in one of the most
surreal scenes ever filmed. On the
beach, the now shipwrecked crew of the rescue team watch in amazement as Jack
and the Pearl come to them. Jack seems unable initially to realize that they
are not all additional illusions, but as realization dawns, he quickly starts
arguing for captaincy of the Black pearl with Barbossa. There is a great moment when their bickering
obliges one crewman to shout an order to his superiors to shut up, before he
realises sheepishly how far he has over-stepped the mark of authority and
command.
The
mistrust between the various members of the crew intensifies. Jack resents
Elizabeth Swann for causing his death, Will Turner is prepared to do anything
to save his father, the rival captains clearly mistrust one another, and even
the mysterious voodoo queen, Tia Dalma has her secrets, notably being the
Goddess Calypso and former wife of Davy Jones (Bill Rigby). Naomie Harris is wonderful in the Calypso
role.
As their
respective agendas and hatreds to one another surface, the characters all pull
guns on one another. The monkey even pulls a gun on the parrot. It is a level
of betrayal and double cross that will be maintained in some cases to the very
end of the film.
We first
learn something of Calypso’s nature when the crew witness the souls of those
who died at sea dead floating through the sea to their respective limbos,
heavens and hells. It seems that Davy Jones had the duty of guiding them but
that he has abandoned that role. Elizabeth sees to er horror that her father,
Jonathan Price, is among the dad. He has been killed by Lord Cutler Beckett
(Tom Hollander). She vows revenge, after a moving, desperate attempt to rescue
her father. His is he first of several
unexpectedly depressing fates in the film.
The crew
now have to return to the real world, and Jack works out that the map means
they have to capsize their ship by running from side to side, so they do. It is now, after they return from world’s
End, that things get increasingly complicated.
Beckett has
control of the heart of Davy Jones, and uses it to blackmail him to his own
will. Its obvious that such use of monsters will end badly for him. He has in
effect made a pact with a Devil. As part of that pact, he has ordered Jones to
destroy his ‘pet’, the Kraken, which is rather conveniently dismissed from the
story without a proper visually pleasing demise. Jack and his allies find its
corpse on a beach. It’s the only really anti-climatic fate in the story. The
creature was so central to events in part two.
A battle
leaves Elizabeth a prisoner of Davy Jones, and she meets Bootstrap Turner, the
father who Will Turner so desperately needs to liberate. She learns how killing
Davy Jones will condemn his killer to taking his place as the captain of the
Flying Dutchman. She is now rescued by
her former lover from the first film, a man who has now realized the awful
tragic scale of what he has done in trying to set a trap for Captain sparrow.
He helps Elizabeth escape, but he is now executed for his assistance by
Bootstrap, who has forgotten the meeting he had with Elizabeth minutes before.
Elizabeth
also finds herself briefly a prisoner of the Chinese, and after an abortive
attempt to seduce and potentially rape her, finds reason to admire her spirit
and then as he dies in an attack by the British, he declares her his new
Captain, and his successor for the Council of Pirate lords.
Jack also
gets caught by The Dutchman, and still having conversations with himself, sees
himself in one guise as a member of the zombie fish like crew, who laments to
the other illusionary Jacks that they mustn’t move because he’s dropped his
brain.
It is now
that we discover Barbossa’s agenda. He knows that the Council of Pirates were
responsible for binding Calypso in her human form, and he plans to release her
in the hope that she will help them to destroy Davy Jones, her former, now
treacherous lover. The others recognise
the threat she could pose if she also takes revenge on the Council, but
Barbossa is keen. He has Calypso incarcerated in the brig to await her fate.
The Council
scenes are a joy on their island made of ships and shipwrecks. Barbossa argues
a case for going to war as the British navy and the Flying Dutchman close in,
but the Council are reluctant. It is cast to a vote to elect a pirate King who
will have the final decision, but some se it as futile when everyone will vote
for himself as the King, which most do, even Elizabeth, but Jack throws his
vote in her favour too, and so she is given command.
This scene
also sees the long awaited moment of the arrival of Jack’s dad, played by
Rolling Stone, Keith Richards who Depp always claimed to have modeled his eccentric,
jiittery performance on. The dog that ended film two on an island of cannibals
accompanies him. Richards’s explanation for its survival and accompaniment to
himself (who wasn’t eventhere0 is just the words ‘sea turtles, mate’. Jack’s dad is accompanied by Jack’s mum,
who is just a shrunken head carried by her husband.
The Council, already betrayed by Will Turner to the British, in the naïve hope of liberating his father, close in for the kill against Elizabeth’s Armada. The scene is set for an epic scale sea battle. It is now that Barbossa puts forward his plan to liberate Calypso. There is a truly beautiful scene where he fails to give the words the necessary lover’s passion, but McKenzie Crook, playing a minor comic relief character, does, and Calypso grows into a fifty foot woman, before vanishing, by turning into an army of crabs similar to those that carried the Black Pearl earlier in the film.
Calypso seems to lose all interest in human affairs rather than taking part in them, though she may well be responsible for the timely storm and maelstrom whirlpool that threatens the ships about to go to war.
The war turns into a battle between the Pearl and the Dutchman, as the other ships mostly retreat and just watch. The ships swirl around the maelstrom, in danger of tangling their masts as they lean into one another. The crews swing round on boarding ropes, from ship to ship, and at times it is hard to keep up with that is fighting who. The parrot simply flies away as a complete deserter until things get safe again. The monkey finds itself fired as a canon ball into the enemy.
The surprises now come with the fates of various people
being decided – Will and Elizabeth have a comic, but romantic wedding conducted
by Barbossa while they all continue their desperate fight. Two members of the British navy who have
provided light relief throughout the films become pirates in mid battle. The
real shock however is the fate of Will and Elizabeth, when Will is the one to
kill the heart of Davy Jones, plunging the monstrous captain to the heart of
the Maelstrom. Will is now doomed to be the new Flying Dutchman captain, only seeing his bride once
every ten years. He takes on the
captaincy and the Dutchman and Pearl unite for a brutal, murderously vengeful
attack on the command ship of Lord Cutler Beckett, taking the ship down in
intense cannon fire from both portside and starboard. Beckett’s crew beg for
orders as to what to do, but he freezes in terror and uncertainty as the ship
is disintegrating around him.
The fates
are now set. Will and Elizabeth retire to a small island where they make love
for the first and last time in ten years before Will goes off with his new crew
and duty to the dead, with his father as a loyal willing crew member in his
service.
Jack wakes
up drunk, only to find that Barbossa has sailed off with The Black Pearl. Jack
has equally betrayed him though by stealing the map, which both men now know
also, shows the location of a mysterious fountain of youth. Jack takes to a
small boat reminiscent of that he first appeared in at the beginning of the
first Pirates film. His fate has come round full circle.
For those
staying to the end of the closing credits there is an additional revelation.
The previous films had minor jokey scenes on their final post-credit moments,
but this film has a plot heavy moment – ten years on from sailing away on the
Dutchman, will returns to the island where he meets his bride, who is waiting
for him with their ten year old daughter. This may create a closure or a
conundrum for their characters in any fourth film, as they will now effectively
be ten years older than the other characters, (unless the fountain of youth
allows them to stay ageless enough to meet up with Will and/or Elizabeth).
A great
finish, in not being cosy and upbeat, with terrific performances from everyone,
especially knightly and of course, Depp.
Arthur Chappell
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