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seems a little odd that the massively superior armada of EITC just piss off when Cutler dies, but still
I think that was just basically to show the stupidity of the Lawful alignment. Chain of command, monolithic, tree-like structure = kill the leader and no one knows what to do. Disorganised but passionate rabble who all backstab each other but are united solely by their hatred of Authority = kill one "leader" and there are still as many more as there are pirates, and everyone decides for hirself what to do. Hercules vs the Hydra, arborescent power structures vs rhizomes of resistance, etc.
Really, for a mainstream Hollywood movie - hell, a Disney movie - this was one of the most unambiguously anti-authoritarian movies i've ever seen. Fucking awesome. The Empire = 100% evil in this one, not even any ambiguity like there was in the previous 2 PoC movies. The Pirates = The Rebel Alliance, but all of them self-interested rationalists (yes, you can be completely insane and still be a rationalist, in the ethical sense of the term), none of that mystical obey-the-laws-of-karma crap that dominated Star Wars.
The opening scene - fuck. Cheesy it may have been, but Bruckheimer knows how to hit a romantic anarchist's buttons. I cried my eyes out. The whole rest of the film failed to seriously emotionally engage me after that, but... wow. Really not the kind of scene i would ever have expected in a Hollywood blockbuster film. It's not often the likes of me see Hollywood making unambiguous propaganda for our side.
Also i'm not sure about Calypso being a villain - she doesn't exactly help the pirates, sure, but she's more of a force of nature, beyond good and evil. One whole underlying message of this movie, with reference both to the Pirate Brethren/Calypso, the Empire/Davey Jones, and Jones/Calypso in both directions, seems to be: if you attempt to bind and control someone/something whose nature is not to be bound and controlled, it will backfire on you and you will get your ass kicked.
I would probably have liked the movie a lot less if i had rewatched the first and second PoC films before watching it - it certainly seemed to leave a lot hanging from the second film, and just dump major plot elements (eg the Kraken). I would have liked to see more Kraken. And more swordfights, too. But, y'know, can't have everything.
The Sikh pirate lord's voice did grate, and to a lesser extent the appearance and accent of the Japanese pirate lord woman, and the fact that, while there was much less misogyny in general than in the other 2 films (at least from my memory - the 2 comic-relief guys were a lot less rapey, at least), the Chinese pirate society seemed to be portrayed as having particularly stereotyped attitudes about women.
Dad Sparrow was completely unnecessary. (I actually thought, when he first appeared, that he was another of the Sparrow's-brain hallucinations.) But, meh, we all knew that Keef was making a cameo, and that he wouldn't be integral to the plot.
But, i think the one thing that i got sufficiently pissed off about for it to really matter was the ending. Why couldn't Elizabeth have decided to join Will and sail the Dutchman with him, becoming an immortal, equally partnered Pirate King and Queen? It kind of felt like they had decided that there was a zeitgeist of these kind of endings (His Dark Materials, the Doctor and Rose, etc), and decided they had to do it because it was the done thing or something. Still, i think i'm wowed enough by the mere fact that such a blatantly anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist Hollywood blockbuster movie was even allowed to be made to forgive it most things, if not quite everything... |
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