(no subject)
The word for that film is: Cephalopod. Or, if you're a fan of Charlie The Unicorn (that's going to get me killed) Liopleurodon
If you're looking for another word, it's "Crabs".
First off, I have to be honest with this. There are some generally pretty people in this series: Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom... and last but not least Johnny Depp.
Also, I'm not looking for anything deep or intellectually challenging. The first two had a generally simple plot and had a minor feel of being taking out of the game Monkey Island. So I liked them, although I liked the first better than the second.
Then there was this.
I have to admit, I was looking forward to it. There'd be more Johnny Depp. There'd be Keith Richards as the father. There'd be Johnny Depp. There'd be silliness, and good characters... and maybe there'd be some plotline. Generally it was the characters that made you watch the films. They were good enough that you'd genuinely root for them. You wanted to see some win, and some fail. Yes, they fell along the lines of "The good guys always dress in white, and the bad guys always dress in black", but it never pretended to be anything else, but it was good at it, and the characters carry it.
The thing is, in this one, the eyecandy didn't match up to what it was in the first two. The character of Jack Sparrow wasn't anything on the first two. He just seemed jaded. I can see why, up until then, Johnny Depp never played the same character twice.
Most of the characters seemed jaded. There wasn't the fun of sitting down to watch Johnny, or any of the other characters. So, that left the storyline. That's when things went really bad.
I don't know how they managed to write it this way. I think that what they did was: The writers got some seafood, but before killing them, they fed them drugs. Then they ate the drug-addled seafood. Then they reached for the cliche dictionary and the Oxford Pirate Dictionary. They took more drugs and played drinking games. At various points various phrases and cliches would be plucked from their various sources, and they would be put into the script.
At other points, they just tried to be too political. Bear in mind, I love politics, and I love political (fictional) shows when done right... this isn't the west wing. The brand of this film was not trading on being cerebral - it was not trading on having 14 storylines. It traded on simplistic goody/baddy style cinematics.
For some reason, the writers decided to throw all this on its head. It was not good.
Actually up until halfway through the film, I felt like I was watching the 3rd matrix film but with pirates (although, it'd be funny to hear Keanu Reeves say "My peanut"). You didn't know who you liked or who you supported. It all got needlessly complicated, and then some.
There were multiple storylines, some of which ended without any real resolution, except that crabs were involved. Beyond that, neither myself nor Rose nor Jack actually really knew what the hell was going on. Half the time the characters were shouting incoherent piratey sayings, obviously chosen from the aforementioned sayings chosen via drinking games.
Now, a note on how I see fight scenes: Some can be good, and some can be bad. I first noticed this with Buffy, you can have scenes that you just enjoy watching, while some just make you yawn or say "Well, that's tedious" or "Well, that makes me uncomfortable, I should be enjoying this". The scenes in PotC3 fall into the latter category. I was just confused. Sure, they were obligatory, but none of them really make me sit up in my seat. Because of the lack of goody/baddy dynamics, I didn't even know who I wanted to win. Actually, generally speaking, you don't have those sorts of fight scenes unless you have that clear-cut, black/white dichotomy, otherwise, you go for a lot more of a subtle approach.
Finally, I wasn't impressed with the ending... but then that folds back to the whole "plot".
All this in three hours.
Overall, I was not impressed.