Bohemia Bunny

Sea turtles, mate.

June 23rd, 2007 by lynn under Leisure

So I went to see the third instalment of that lovely Pirates movie franchise. Frankly, I don’t know what other people are complaining about, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s eye candy, action sequences, complex plotlines, and mushy lovey-dovey scenes to keep everyone happy, along with the odd comic relief and references to previous films. It’s really a film that bears repeated watchings, although there will be some who balk at the very mention of sitting through this 3-hour outing.

As much as I would love to tease apart its tangled threads one by one, the fact is it’s already been done, and much better than I ever could do. Why not be frivolous and light-hearted instead? It was so much fun spotting the references. And unlike in Shrek 3, the rehashed jokes didn’t fall flat on their faces - or at least I didn’t have to force a laugh.

• Rum jokes - mild tweaks kept the jokes funny, just like variations on a theme.
• Sea turtles - a reference to Pirates 1.
• Ragetti - everything happens to this poor guy. He loses an eye, gets crabs in his pants, but he can deliver a whispered lover’s incantation like no one else. I wonder where he learnt that.
• Jack referred to Will as a eunuch in Pirates 1, and did it again in Pirates 2.
• At the end of Pirates 3, Elizabeth uses Jack’s farewell line on him, but he hits back with a suave rejoinder. Witty Jack, indeed.
• Davy Jones has a bucket. Many buckets, in fact. Ah, bukkits.
• My favourite word in the film has to be “tentacley”. To be accompanied by wiggling fingers under one’s chin.
• Those 2 dudes from the East India Company, and formerly with the Navy (I think) - they may have brilliant skills of logical deduction, but possess woefully inadequate powers of observation.
• Singapore 200 years ago was apparently much more mountainous. I tell you, erosion is a terrible thing.
• Orlando Bloom cements his stature as the new Keanu Reeves - gorgeous, wooden leading man. Look, all I need from Will is to swashbuckle, kiss Elizabeth and engage in complex power games. Keira Knightley and Stellan Skarsgard already deliver pathos by the shipload *hur hur hur*.
• This is by far the saddest of the Pirates movies - there’s a strong undercurrent of loss running through the film, which is why it’s the only Pirates movie that made me choke up.
• Have your pick of the 3 father-child relationships: One terminated prematurely, one demonstrating that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the last one finally surfacing after being the dormant thread connecting all three films.
• The reason why Davy Jones’s heart has the power to control the seas can be inferred easily, once you have enough pieces of the puzzle.
• Pirate boots are very sexy. Their removal is even sexier.

Getting serious now, what really stuck with me after the final credits was what the film had to say about love, or rather the difficulties involved in loving someone. Tia Dalma put it best when she queried, “Would you love me if I were anything other than what I am?” It was her inherent nature that caused problems, and yet it’s her very nature that draws her lover.

Will and Elizabeth, meanwhile, face less otherworldly conundrums. Theirs is a simple problem of trust. Instead of relief when he finds out Elizabeth’s unromantic reason for kissing Jack Sparrow at the end of Pirates 2, Will expresses displeasure that she did not trust him with her plans. And as with so many other things in the Pirates movies, Will decides that turn-around is fair play, and answers her later admonishments with her own justification. Therefore, poppets, the moral of the story is: If you can’t trust the one you love, who can you trust? (Especially in that atmosphere of betrayal.)

And a final rumination on long-distance relationships: This movie has the bitchin’ mother of all LDRs, so I guess folks in those days must have been much more patient.