Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

[alias_sqbr]

A silly, shallow film with no moral centre, character growth or deep ideas that knows exactly what it is. I have this mental image of people from the art and choreography departments designing some cool set pieces inspired by a brief look at the cover of the Tim Powers novel, and then the writers being told to come up with some way to string them together involving as many scenes with Jack Sparrow as possible.

Anyway, I enjoyed it well enough though I don't know if I'll ever watch it again. It was surprisingly free of gratuitous cheesecake: There are semi naked mermaids and Penelope Cruz in a low cut top, but the emphasis of the plot and camera angles etc was definitely on awesome not sexy. Though on the whole this is definitely not a progressive film, eg the race dynamics are as icky as ever.

I really liked that since Jack is a morally ambiguous guy who never cares much about anything they didn't try and make the audience see his cause as noble or important. The characters spend the film trying to outrace the Spanish to the fountain of youth, and we see pretty much everyone except the Spanish do despicable things in order to get it. (They're also profligate with their longboats. Yes, that's the implausible detail I'm choosing to focus on)

Oh, and if you haven't read the book: it's really good! And has almost nothing to do with the film, the only character it even has in common is Blackbeard.

Comments

[tree]

i took my mum to see it and i thought it was very boring. she enjoyed it, though, which was the important part. but! the mermaids! fascinated me! i came home and wrote down all these notes about them and the differing mythologies used for them. and i want someone to talk about it with! (which is not to say that you are that person. i am just expressing that desire generally.)

[rdm]

About the only thing missing from the mermaids was the whole immortality/become a monster upon eating their flesh thing from Japanese mythos!

[adelheid]

The "only women in the movie are evil"-ness of the mermaid plot REALLY skeeved me out. Hated it.

[alias_sqbr]

I can definitely see how someone could find it boring since it had no substance.

But yes, the mermaids were interesting, though I don't know about mermaid mythology to comment on them very much. I can't remember if they were in the book.

[alias_sqbr]

Well, that would make the search for the fountain of youth seem a bit superfluous!

[alias_sqbr]

I felt like it should have bothered me, but for some reason it didn't. Can see why it would put you off though.