Contradicting Popular Opinion:
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
INTRO
I’ll be the first to admit. I never saw the appeal of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. I didn’t think it would make a whole lot of money. What adult wants to see a pirate movie based on an amusement park ride? I thought the story was too boyish for girls, and the choice of actors were too chick flick for boys.
It’s safe to say that I was proven wrong on these things. The movie made three gazillion dollars and has spawned a (so far) successful franchise.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Here we have PotC:DMC the sequel to PotC:CotBP. Those abbreviations just roll off the tongue, eh? I watched this film today, and a couple of things came to mind.
First and foremost, the thing that came to my mind was, editing. Both in the film and written sense. There was no logical progression for one scene to the next. Furthermore, there is no excuse for a cheesy film about pirates to be one hundred and fifty minutes long. This thing is especially true considering that the presentation was such that the film would’ve maintained the same level of narrative coherence by means of ending at any previous moment. The audience is never given the feeling that “this is the point at which the movie must end.” Rather, the film seems to say, “ending here is as good as anywhere else, I’d gather.”
I don’t believe that every story, or even every film, requires a beginning, middle and end. Generally though, when common story structure is abandoned it is due to reliance on heavy thematic elements or other artistic notions that defy the standard model. I don’t really feel that to be the case with PotC:DMC. It seems to be more of a routine adventure movie with a script rushed to meet a deadline.
The whole experience is rather numbing. There exists no real sense of buildup or payoff. Despite all of the action and adventure, our characters never seem to be in any real danger. Hence, there is little excitement, even when the contrived and ridiculous action sequences occur. There are extended sword fights where noone gets tired, and our heroes escape without so much as a cut. Our heroes get knocked out, fall from cliffs, and are attacked from monsters, but they never get bruised or limp or even say, “ow.” They are cartoons. At the same time, third tier characters are mercilessly and emotionlessly slaughtered without so much as an afterthought. Dead Man’s Chest is a prime example of typical Hollywood consequence-free, context free, violence.
All in all, the flick just comes off as vaguely “cute”; at its best, it is about as entertaining as watching somebody else play video games. After viewing it, I’ll be damned if I could tell you much about what I just witnessed.
I could tell you that we had a lot of Campbell model hero stuff going on, with various calls to adventures, supernatural aids, a road of trials, a meeting with the goddess, woman as a temptress, atonement with father, the ultimate boon, etc. These are all standard parts of Acts 1 and 2 of the hero myth, and I feel their PotC representatives are fairly self evident. It’s madlibs Campbell.
The question for me is: Is Dead Man’s Chest simply following the Campbell model, or is it following the Campbell model by means of Star Wars? The similarities between the franchises are striking. I’m talking original Star Wars trilogy of course. We have a tough yet feminine young woman who is a political figure torn between the stalwart yet naive swordsman and the charming pirate. Said pirate is captain of a remarkably fast ship of questionable ownership. Said pirate also abandons his peers before an important battle, only to return mid-conflict and save the day. Long-standing bounties leads to the pirates’ falls at the end of their respective second movies, with the rescues planned for the third. The father of the stalwart yet naive swordsman is working for the enemy. One of our heroes is worshiped as a god by jungle savages. Both franchises contain wise swamp prophets. Our heroes have corrupt empires working against them.
But maybe that is just me.
My friend and former neighbor, Connor, is a huge fan of this flick, and wrote a bit about it on his blog, which in turn lead to an interesting discussion of the film.
As is usually the case, my buddy DC summed things up better than I can:
So, I saw this pirate movie. The first run of shots, from the rained-out wedding to the floating coffins, had more elegiac heft than I expected, but these early signs of promise faded into distant memory during the many set-pieces that ensued. The half-hour following the appearance of the titular chest eschewed the expected climactic crescendo in favor of an endless and bebarnacled CGI beach-party.
That said, I buy Pirates 2 as the representative representative to date of an important trend in popular culture toward pastiche than outruns its own ironic distance. This is a movie that will always trade its momentum for a self-regarding laugh or twitch. There is some kind of reassuring (maybe radical) populist charge to be found in the feeling that mounting narrative tension will evaporate long enough to allow characters to react to their own mannerisms…but the resulting flight from narrative coherence ultimately turns the film into a sequence of tickles.
What I don’t buy is that the critical response is voided because Pirates is an unprecedented manifestation of myth within cinema. Many reviews were dismissive, but film history is rich in narrative experimentation. If you need a rich integration of mythology, history, and personal psychology, I recommend throwing a dart at a stack of Westerns.
I don’t mean to dismiss your reaction to this film. It’s part of something new and the critical vocabulary is not set in place, but I expect this film is the placenta and not the baby.
DC is a great guy.
Equal time
IP’s own Mark B. responded to last week’s column by saying:
Had I known I was going to be quoted, I would have provided a more thorough quote than something akin to sarcastic dismissal.
I just want you to know that.
Fair enough. So, here is Mark, with something more thorough than a sarcastic dismissal:
To me, Donnie Darko is a lot like the Maxx, only not as well written. If you take the concept and view it at surface level only, it’s a fairly okay piece of work that, while it’s largely uninteresting and uninspiring, is decent enough for what it is. My problem with the film comes more from the “open to interpretation” aspect of it that has pushed viewers in the direction of openly interpreting the film as they see fit. To be honest, the film inspires a lot of over analysis that it really doesn’t warrant, and this is coming from a guy who over analyzes EVERYTHING. I mean, Jesus, Roger Ebert wrote a commentary about how he felt the film dealt with the concepts of sexuality and teenage growth and whatnot.
I’m also not thrilled that the film seems to take itself entirely too seriously a lot of the time. We have all of these things about the “Manipulated Dead” and “Corruption versus Wormholes” and whatnot that are meant to explain the story but only really serve to confuse the viewer. There is no “secret message”, there’s no need to bust out your decoder ring to try and solve the puzzle, it’s a movie about a kid who saves reality via time travel. All of the college stoners and Emo kids who are trying to project themselves into the situation by assigning greater meaning to his generally miserable life, et al, are doing nothing more than digging up a dog bone in the back yard and proclaiming it a fossil. THAT’S what makes no sense.
We’re a little short this week, so let’s get some more DC to fill things out:
And until this column arrived I had no idea that Donnie Darko had such a loyal following of haters. I guess it makes sense. There’s no denying the accusations of emo-affinity, though I’m not sure it’s entirely Richard Kelly’s fault folks are having their obnoxious epiphanies all over his movie (get the mop). I mean, you can’t go too far wrong with Tears for Fears, an evil schizobunny, bizarre period markers, and Patrick Swayze doing the dirtiest dance of all.
If anything, it’s one of the least obnoxious in a rash of recent films dedicated to selling the point (as elaborately as possible) that life makes sense, but not to us. Hence recurrent motifs and fairly competent structure give the impression that some principle is playing out, but good f*cking luck deciphering the dialogue. Still, it’s a distinctive if harmlessly pretentious film. We should be saving up the indignation for real crap like Babel, Crash, Syriana, and all the other middle-class handjobs that don’t even have a cool soundtrack.
I also got an interesting array of hatemail, but none of those e-mailers would respond to my responses. So no loving for them. Damnit, we want a free market of ideas!
