REVIEW: PotC – At World’s End0

So, I just came back from seeing Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End with some friends, and here is my take on the movie. Please note that some spoilers may be in the review, if you who havn’t seen it yet.

It started off really a lot better than the second one, with a nice sequence that doesn’t really put you right into the movie, but sort of gets you in the mood for the movie. I loved the beginning bit in Singapore with some of the nice action (and loads of explosions, so you could tell it was a Bruckheimer film). It’s a fine introduction to the plot. The movie takes for granted you already know the characters, which I think is great (another movie that does this is Matrix Revolutions, and a movie that provides constant flashbacks making it quite boring to see is the Lord of the Rings trilogy). The story progresses very, very quickly from there and there’s not a single relaxing moment in the entire film, despite it’s length of close to 3 hours. It doesn’t really involve a lot of real action sequences unfortunantly, and the middle hour basically consists just of people talking. The final action sequence is a really fantastic set piece, although it’s shot in a pretty confusing way so you don’t really know from time to time which ship the characters are fighting on. In the whole the movie is a lot better structured and thought-through, and therefor a vast improvement on the flimsy and from time-to-time unlogical second movie.

What about the acting? Well, I guess there’s really not much to say. Johnny Depp plays his part as Jack Sparrow as he always have and I’ve got mixed feelings about this. It’s jolly fun sometimes, but on select occasions it can just get tedious and dull to watch, since you almost know exactly how he is going to react in certain situations. I’m sure this is not a fault of Depp’s, but mostly in the character development and script writing area. Orlando Bloom plays it mostly just by the book, with nothing special to say about it. He does exactly the same acting work as in the previous movies, although his character makes some pretty weird choices in this movie, but again this is just part of character development, and not acting. Keira Knightley also plays her part good, it’s anyway better to the sequel’s “Damsel in distress”. She’s given what should probably be a epic and encouraging speech near the end of the movie, but it doesn’t really come out of the screen like some other movie speeches (such as the speech of Théoden during the famous Rohirrim scene in Return of the King). But the best performance is hands down performed by Geoffrey Rush, who has returned to his role of Captain Barbossa. It’s always fun to see someone really enjoying their work, and since Rush is such a great actor, it certainly pays off. He outacts the rest of the cast with his perfect impression of a salty old pirate. Bill Nighy is also great as Davy Jones, and he proves in this movie how good he is at portraying different characters, even if the only thing left from his original performance is his eyes. Oh, and Keith Richards is in this movie as well, which was pretty cool. He doesn’t really have a major part in the movie, and he really doesn’t add or subtract anything from the total experience I had watching the movie.

Then there is another important thing which has been wildly talked about when discussing this movie, and that’s the Visual FX. Once again, Tom Knoll and his team at ILM take on the role to create pretty much a whole world of desert-sailing ships, physics-defying stunts and makeup. The most stand-out effect is without doubt the Davy Jones squid makeup, which is even better than it was in last year’s movie, Dead Man’s Chest. It looks really natural, and it looks like a real character, which is one of the first time I’ve said so. His crew on The Flying Dutchman is also great in how they act, and it mostly looks like if they just handpicked some people on the street with some really weird facial features. Other than that, most of the CG work really can’t be noticed (I am aware of the amount of CG in the movie and could spot where it was used, but most of it looks really natural). During the final battle some obvious greenscreening can be seen, where the background footage doesn’t really match up with the camera move, but I guess you would have to be a Visual FX ultra-geek like me to notice things like that. Another thing that was fantastic was the sound and music of the movie. It all felt extremely well mixed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the crew wins an Oscar next year for best Sound Design. Especially during some of the Matrix’y slow-motion sequences (yes, there are one or two of those) it sounds really nice, with wood cracking and metal bending.

So overall, I was very pleasantly surprised with this movie. Since I saw Spider-Man 3 a couple of weeks earlier and really didn’t like it, I went in with really low expectations after not liking the second movie that much, but came out liking this a lot more (it is not as good as the first movie though, but this movie is miles closer to it than it’s prequel). Just some unlogical plot twists, editorial flaws and some of the acting not being as good as it could’ve been stops this from scoring really high. I enjoyed this movie, and will probably buy it when it arrives on DVD (and hopefully Blu-Ray) later this year.

Verdict: 8 out of 10