PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END 2-disc Limited Edition

By: Tim Janson
Review Date: Sunday, December 23, 2007

You want to know the best thing about the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy? It’s the interest that it sparked in that historical period. Since the first movie came out there have been numerous books published about pirates and several documentaries produced by such networks as The History Channel and The Discovery Channel. As a history buff myself, anything that increases people’s interest in history is always welcome. The films themselves have been light, entertaining fun but I think it’s definitely time to bring the series to a close. “At World’s End” threatens to sink itself under the weight of it’s own jumbled and nearly incomprehensible plotlines and that is truly an achievement considering how befuddling the second film, “Dead Man’s Chest”, turned out to be.

The plots and subplots are nearly incalculable: Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) want to save Jack (Depp) from Davy Jones’ locker…to do so they need to steal the sea charts from rival pirate captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun Fat). Lord Beckett has allied with Davy Jones’ Flying Dutchman to wipe out all the pirates. The Pirates need to call together the Brethren Court consisting of the Nine Pirate Lords to ally together and stop Beckett. Now…Elizabeth eventually is elected the Pirate King…errr…Queen, and she wants revenge on Beckett for killing her father; Jack is trying to save his own father from his fate as a member of Jones’ eternally damned crew; Jones is in love with the Jamaican voodoo priestess Tia Dalma who turns out to be the sea Goddess Calypso. The Pirate Brethren had imprisoned Calypso years before but now want to free her in hopes that they’ll aid them in battle with Beckett’s forces; Jack has a reunion with his father, Captain Teague (Keith Richards) and on and on the film meanders. I found myself nodding off a couple of times during the film. Never has pirating been this excruciatingly dull! There are LONG stretches where the characters just sit around and talk endlessly. How bad is it? Well, when Jack is imprisoned at the beginning of the film, he hallucinates several duplicate Jack Sparrows to converse with. Apparently Director Gore Verbinski thought it one Jack was great five would be even better.


Verbinski evidently thought he was Peter Jackson because he turned the film into a near three-hour epic. By my watch, that was about an hour too long. Jackson had the source material of J.R.R. Tolkien to work with and Verbinski, umm, didn’t. Depp is always a professional and yet even he seemed bored by the film. The one saving Grace to Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is the final forty minutes that featured the climatic battle between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman amidst a swirling maelstrom. It was a spectacular visual and far and way the best part of the film although it was just a bit too late.

As far as the various performances, Bloom was relegated to about fifth fiddle behind Depp, Rush, Knightley, and even Nill Nighy who played Davy Jones. We’ve seen recent pictures of Knightley looking damn near anorexic and while she still a stunningly beautiful woman, her appearance was noticeably more gaunt than in the first two films. Rush seemed to me to be the one actor who really threw himself into his role with full gusto, delivering his lines in over-the-top dramatic fashion. For what little time he was onscreen, Keith Richards provided a scene stealing, fresh dynamic.

Extras

The two-disc set comes with a good number of extras although most of them are fairly short, under five minutes.

“Keith and the Captain” looks at Keith Richards on set and the absolute reverence in which cast and crew treated him.

There is a blooper reel which runs about five minutes and is worth a few laughs although not as much as one would hope.

There are a couple of short, deleted scenes with optional director commentary

“Anatomy of a Scene: The Maelstrom” was the best extra. It showed how the maelstrom scene was created as the crew worked inside an enormous airplane hanger.

“The Pirate Maestro” The Music of Hans Zimmer” presents a look at Zimmer’s score and is also a very good feature as the music is one of the strong points of the film.

Other features include a look at the nine pirate lords of the Brethren Court, features on designing the pirate’s world, and the multiple Jack Sparrow Sequences.