At World's End

Thanks to KarenKuna, myself and about 50 other friends of hers were treated to a screening of Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End last night. Benc and I went--rather, persevered--through the absurd, preposterous, inconceivable 1.5 hour traffic from our condo unit to the Podium and my cough-cold-upper respiratory tract infected condition. Hehehe.

We got to the mall with barely 30 minutes to spare. (I was fantasizing about taking some hot lentil soup at Cafe Med but thanks to the traffic, nodice). We had a couple of subsandwiches at Subway then, filed into the moviehouse. Some of our friends were in Pirate costume, Karen had her hat, and Will Turner turned up. They were a sight to see.

So the nearly-three-hour movie unfolded. I was waiting to be blown out of my seat, but I guess I know better next. Expecting that much from a third-installment story will not always come to pass. (Except ROTK maybe, hehe) I wanted to roar with laughter the way I did in the first and second movies. I wanted gripping fight scenes and edge-of-my seat stunts like the swordfight-in-the-wooden wheel scene, or the hanging-over-the-cliff-in-a-rope-net scene. I was waiting for the ironic lines and Jack Sparrow-isms but they came in the second half of the movie already. It was a long wait.

Mostly the movie was about resolving Davy Jones's (after) life decisions, how Will and Elisabeth would turn out, who Tia Dalma really was. Most of the movie was about resolving planted story lines in the second Pirates movie, and many pirate myths and legends were into the third movie. This was both interesting and a bit frustrating for me because I felt like the movie was jamming too much information into my brain.

Don't get me wrong, I love stories like these, it's just that I felt they were presenting the lore as if everyone was familiar with it already. Since the lore of the sea is very rich, I would have appreciated a better exposition flowing from one character to another. Here, bits and pieces were mentioned all over the movie, and one had to be quick enough to catch them, store them top of mind and tie them up with the next factoid. This was quite a lot of work for someone who just wanted to be entertained (and who was feeling under the weather). Imagine having to do all that and wanting to react to the funny lines, gaze at Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and take in the great cinematography all at the same time.

Like all part-three movies, this one wanted to accomplish so much that it almost became too much. ALMOST. Good thing they were able to relax in the end. I liked the fact that it wasn't an out-and-out happy ending. I like that there were compromises, and the heroes of the story accepted the consequences. I liked that Asians figured in this movie, even if they were just treated like a big, expensive cameo role (read: Chow Yun Fat). But I wondered why they chose Singapore, when there wasn't a Singapore during that time. The pirate haven then was Indonesia--known in antiquity as Java/Sumatra/Surabaya (I think). I would also have loved to see more of Calypso the goddess. I felt like she came and went, when her release was in fact one of the quests of Captain Barbossa and the Brethren.

There wasn't much Jack Sparrow the character did, til the end of the movie. The stuff I was waiting for came in the last 45 minutes. But it was all good. At least it was still there. Nobody can do Jack the way Johnny does it.