Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Sometimes things just need to go back to their roots. That’s what I thought of when I first heard of a fourth Pirates movie that was to come out. The first Pirates was an instant classic. The next couple, although still good, seemed to get mired down in a much too serious plot. If Pirates were to continue, things needed to get taken back to the adventuring Jack Sparrow. Let’s all be honest, he’s the only reason why the movies are at all worth watching and if there was to be a fourth, it needed to put the focus back on him in a more light-hearted type of way akin to the first film. Hence Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was born.
This was a movie I was looking forward to as I felt it was the perfect opportunity for the franchise to get back to its roots. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley had become to expensive to keep in a film with Johnny Depp so it was fairly certain from very early on that they would be axed. It seemed like the perfect setup. Get the spotlight back on Depp, and move the plot from some overly melancholic tale of worry that spans multiple movies into a new story that could just be more fun.
Unfortunately the movie simply fell flat. Depp was great, as usual. More than ever, he is the only reason worth watching the film. The easiest and most likely source of the failure would be Rob Marshall. Who is Rob Marshall you might ask? Exactly. The first three Pirates films were directed by Gore Verbinski. Sure, he hadn’t done a whole lot before Pirates, but the Pirates movies were obviously well done. So for reasons unknown to me (maybe he was just wanting to do something else) Gore Verbinski did not return for number four. Instead, we get Rob Marshall as director. You might know him from such wonderful action/adventure films as Chicago and Memoirs of a Geisha . . . oh wait, those movies are nothing like the Pirates movies. I honestly have no idea what Disney was thinking with this decision but what is even more amazing is that because this film still made money, they are thinking about keeping Rob Marshall in for number 5 (yes, number 5) but that is for another story.
Anyways, this film suffered from the drawing board problem. The drawing board problem is what happens when you have uncreative and unskilled people take over a successful franchise. What happens is they have a big meeting in front of a big board and they go through and list everything that makes up each entry in the franchise. Witty one-liners from Jack Sparrow? Check. Lots of clumsy action sequences? Check. Some sort of supernatural power? Check. Token semi-romantic interest? Check. If you simply list out everything that happens in Stranger Tides it looks remarkably similar to the other Pirates movies. The problem is that it is just all put together so poorly.
A hugely disappointing area is that of setting. I’m not sure if Disney was just trying to go super cheap on everything or whose fault this is, but the vast majority of backdrops looked extremely poor. The best example of this is all the scenes where they are in the jungle. It looks like the crew just setup a row ‘jungle looking plants’ behind the actors and called it a day. The visual imagery of the first three movies was very well done. You would see these amazing places that would look fantastical. For this fourth film, it just seems like instead of giving the attention that was needed, the name of the game was to be cheap and quick.
Stranger Tides flowed like a jarbled mess of things happening. You can just imagine how each of the major points in the movie was thought up and sounded alright, but it just seemed like no effort was made to put everything together into a smooth and cohesive story.
At the end of the day you end up with a lively Jack Sparrow stuck in this bland, and boring world that is constantly jumping from one action sequence to the next. Worth seeing? Maybe. Let’s hope Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer can put together something better for part 5.
