Skip to main content

Strange Indeed


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 doesnā€™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 ā€œAt Worldā€™s End.ā€ With ā€œOn Stranger Tidesā€ it went way past that point and failed to find it again.

In ā€œPirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tidesā€ 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 ā€“ 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), Jackā€™s old lover and daughter of Blackbeard (played by Ian McShane). Together, albeit reluctantly, they set off to find the Fountain of Youth ā€“ 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 wasnā€™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 doesnā€™t recover. The writers tried to bring that back with the introduction of the eye candy young male but letā€™s face it ā€“ you canā€™t replace Will Turner and you certainly canā€™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 couldnā€™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 canā€™t be done. The Pirates saga was a great one for 3 movies ā€“ they stuck the knife in with the 4th and will drive it further with the 5th.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What feeds your soul?

What feeds your soul? This is a very large question filled with incredible, easy to discover answers but sometimes the hardest to put into practice. As a new mom (daughter, 14 months) I have had a hard time feeding my soul without feeling guilty. Every time I do something for myself that feeds my soul (reading, writing, watching my favorite TV show or movie) I feel guilty that I am not spending that time with my daughter. Even if my daughter is asleep or playing by herself which my wife and I want her to be able to do I still feel guilty that I am taking the time for myself instead of her.  The joys of motherhood! dTaking a step back for a moment, what does feeding your soul mean? In the simplest sense it means doing something that you love and/or are passionate about. No one can find out what you love other than you but some things could include reading, meditating, yoga, soaking in the bath, writing, anything. The choice is up to you. But the thing you have to learn is feed...

A Forgotten Book

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 couldnā€™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 havenā€™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. ...

Once Upon A Time

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 ā€“ Once Upon A Time.    The show is about a boy, Henry, who believes that his town ā€“ Storybrooke, Maine ā€“ 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 canā€™t remember who they are. Still with me? Good. Letā€™...