Or take the heavily weighted scene, early on, in which the movie fills us in about the lost romance that helped make Davy Jones into the monster he is. It turns out that he was loved, then abandoned, by Tia Dalma, the mumbo-jumbo-talking voodoo priestess. (What these two ever did on a date I can't imagine, but that's another story.) At World's End wouldn't be the first movie to take a seething villain and complicate our feelings about him by giving him a sympathetic back story. Just look at The Phantom of the Opera, or at how the revelation about Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back changes our relationship to him. But in Pirates, nothing changes: I kept waiting for the Davy Jones/Tia Dalma plot to come to fruition, but instead, it's just another stray piece of information, made irrelevant the moment that Tia Dalma expands, like the dough boy at the end of Ghostbusters, into the Goddess of the Sea, a special effect that seems to exist for no other reason than to make us go ''Wow!'' At which point we can move on to the next fractured/unresolved/half-baked plot point. You could argue that all of this, in some literal way, ''makes sense,'' but my argument is that very little of it makes sense emotionally. What's really muddled in At World's End isn't logic, per se, but any semblance of a human dramatic experience.
But ay, there's the rub — or, at least, where the twain of the debate shall meet. Reading the posts by those of you who find Pirates perfectly easy and straightforward to follow, one picks up on a certain videogame-era vanity: The plot makes perfect sense! Just use your head! Is it anyone's fault but your own that you can't get with the movie's program?
If I can translate their ire, what I think these folks are saying isn't that they can actually piece together every last lurching, half-dangled plot fragment. They're saying that what doesn't quite parse in Pirates doesn't quite matter to them. In so many ways, At World's End is a quintessential contempo blockbuster, a movie that works by throwing stuff at you, and logic be damned. The lack of logic is the movie's logic. That's what makes it a ride, a candy storm for the eyes and the gut, an experience beyond the creaky confines of a neat, sensible, crisply organized, three-act narrative. The two halves of this argument may be yelling at each other, but in another sense they're really saying the same thing. It's just that some of us want even a pirate adventure movie to add up in a certain way — not just on the connect-the-dots level of a comic-book flowchart, but as a genuine dramatic journey, a roller-coaster for the heart. For others, that very goal may now be passé.
What do you think? Does ''Pirates 3'' play it too fast and loose with its plot points? Does it matter to you? Post your comments on the message board below.
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Add Your Comments
You Might Also Like
- DVD Review Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Dec 04, 2007) | Ty Burr
- Movie Review Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (May 25, 2007) | Owen Gleiberman
- Summer Movie Q&A ''Pirates'' director keelhauls critics | Josh Rottenberg
- Movie News Swashbuckling on the ''Pirates'' red carpet (May 25, 2007) | Carrie Bell
- Cover Story ''Pirates 3'': Depp and his mates aim to outgun ''Spidey'' (May 25, 2007) | Josh Rottenberg
- The Q&A Depp: I draw the line at ''Capt. Jack toothpaste'' | Josh Rottenberg
