Skip to main content

Strange Indeed

By

Whenever Hollywood makes trilogies, they have to tread very carefully. They want to extend the storyline to the exact point where the audience has gotten just enough and doesn’t need any more closure or information. If it goes past that point, the audience gets laden with too much information and loses interest to keep going back. If it stops short of that point, the audience feels gipped that they wasted all of this time without a significant end to the story. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise stopped at the right point when it finished “At World’s End.” With “On Stranger Tides” it went way past that point and failed to find it again.

In “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” the audience finds Jack Sparrow in quite the predicament. His first mate Gibbs tries to free him from the gallows but alas he is captured and brought before King George who has a new right hand man – Captain Barbosa. The King wants Jack to guide an expedition to locate the Fountain of Youth before the Spanish do. He declines and escapes meeting up with his father who tells him of the dangers of finding the Fountain of Youth and that someone is impersonating Jack to attain a crew for the purpose of finding the Fountain of Youth. That person is Angelica (played by Penelope Cruz), Jack’s old lover and daughter of Blackbeard (played by Ian McShane). Together, albeit reluctantly, they set off to find the Fountain of Youth – no matter what the cost.

The premise sounds great and the movies flows but it seemed that the writers had too much story to put into a 2.5 hour sitting. The movie seemed rushed as a whole and Jack felt rushed throughout the entire movie, not sitting back and taking it all in as the audience is used to seeing him. To put it strangely, Jack Sparrow looked and acted like a normal person. There wasn’t the same bickering and bantering back and forth as with the previous 3 movies. The movie as a whole might have been better with Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. Without those two characters, the movie lacks depth that Johnny Depp and Captain Sparrow cannot make up. The movie becomes too flat and doesn’t recover. The writers tried to bring that back with the introduction of the eye candy young male but let’s face it – you can’t replace Will Turner and you certainly can’t replace the script between the two.

I will admit I was a little hesitant to see this movie from the beginning. Without my favorite characters, I couldn’t see how it was going to work. I decided to see it because Jack Sparrow and Johnny Depp are amazing and the movie should have been good based on that alone. I was wrong. It was as if Hollywood decided to make a Back to the Future 4 and took out Marty or Doc; it can’t be done. The Pirates saga was a great one for 3 movies – they stuck the knife in with the 4th and will drive it further with the 5th.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Once Upon A Time

By
Out of all of the new shows I had decided to watch this year, it comes as so surprise that the one show I have kept up with the most is the show from the same producers as Lost – Once Upon A Time.    The show is about a boy, Henry, who believes that his town – Storybrooke, Maine – is really the Enchanted Forest and everyone has forgotten who they are. He came to that idea from a book he was given by his teacher, Mary Margaret who Henry believes is really Snow White.   He believes his adoptive mother, Regina, is really the Evil Queen, his therapist is Jiminy Cricket, the John Doe in the hospital is Prince Charming, and the one who can save everything is Emma, his birth mother who gave him up for adoption 10 years ago. And did I mention that Henry believes Emma to be the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming?   Henry also believes that the Evil Queen cast a curse on the whole Enchanted Forest which is why they can’t remember who they are. Still with me? Good. Let’...
Post a Comment
Read more

"For a Few to be Immortal, Many Must Die" - In Time

By
It is an interesting topic – living forever.   We all have said at one point or another we want the fountain of youth to bless us with eternal beauty and life.   But what would living forever mean? You would see history happen right before your eyes – and see it written in history books for children to read during school.   If you had been living forever, you could have seen the curse start for the Red Sox in 1918 and then get broken in 2004.   And again in 2007.   But what it would it mean?   By living forever, you don’t like a day in your life. If you live forever, what makes tomorrow so special.   The people in District 12 have it better than the rich – they have to make very moment, every second count. In Time, starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, is set in 2161 where a genetic alteration has allowed humanity to stop aging past age 25.   But people are required to earn more time in order to stay alive past age 25 or their ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Forgotten Book

By
When you have a list of over 400 books on your to-read list, you tend to forget that you put some of them on the list. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is one of those books. I used the randomizer on my Goodreads list to give me my next book after Landline. It gave me Station Eleven. I tried racking my brain, willing myself to recall when I put this on my list and my mind couldn’t come up anything. I guess that is what happens with over 400 books on your list. Station Eleven is about the post-collapse United States and Canada and the characters that have lived through it (and some that haven’t).  A flu broke out in Toronto that had an incubation period of less than 24 hours once exposed.  Only 1 in 3000 survived the outbreak.  Everything is gone - electricity, internet, gas, everything that we take for granted all gone in a couple of years.  The story moves back and forth between pre-collapse and post-collapse as well as between 3 main character lives. ...
Post a Comment
Read more