Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 7:38 pm
I guess I shall stop reading this thread since I did not see the movie yet..... 
I saw the movie last week. My thoughts:
SPOILERS
This film's plot was even less coherent than the previous ones. In 1 and 2, the plots were complicated and I didn't even try to keep up, but here it really felt half finished. There's a bit when a character comments about Jack Sparrow "Do you think he makes it up as he goes along?" and I felt that could apply to the film as a whole.
The love relationship was extremely ponderous in this film and thoroughly unnecessary, in my opinion. Keira Knightley's character has become so forceful that she could have done just fine as a non-love interest in my opinion. The wedding scene on board the boat in the middle of a pitched battle effectively killed my suspension of disbelief. Knightley's growing forcefulness was a welcome bucking of the shrinking-violet damsel trend, but the script writer seemed to want to have it both ways.
Johnny Depp is increasingly becoming one of the only saving graces of the movie. Unfortunately, it appears the director has realized this too and there are some scenes that feature multiple Johnny Depps acting strangely. While this might have come off as quirky and intriguing if done differently, here I couldn't shake the feeling that some market research had guided this decision (that and the desire to make this film appeal to squealing middle school girls).
Don't even get me started on the Asian characters. The fact that the film chose to actually include them was laudable and good. The fact that they're primarily window dressing and/or disposable NPC types is not. (Sao Feng, the character played by an extremely-underused Chow Yun Fat, is literally the only main character in the whole movie to be killed by indirect shrapnel. He also lusts stereotypically after the white female, and his dying wish places the entire Asian crew under her command. I suppose a strong and competent Asian main character would be too much to ask of Hollywood.)
Davey Jones becomes a much more interesting character in this movie, which is very welcome. You see his human face briefly, in an unexpectedly warm conversation with Calypso. I had been expecting to see it again in some sort of partial redemption moment at the end, but that didn't happen.
The naval battle scenes are amazingly well done, as expected.
All in all, it relied even more heavily on bang-fwish effects to entertain than did the two prequels. Fortunately, those effects deliver... but there are points where the characters themselves engage in a few (doomed) attempts to try to make sense of all the plots and schemes.
I'm sure the theater audience can sympathize with them.
Also, notice the post-title sequence introduces a child of Will Turner, but you can't really tell the gender of the kid. Part of me cynically took that to mean that the scriptwriters hadn't decided on the character's grown gender in Pirates IV...
