Pirates of the Carribean: At Wit's End

A lot of the criticism I’ve read of “Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End” fixates on the movie’s length and convolution in a way that makes me suspect that critics have deliberately decided to judge it by standards other than its own. Having formed a set of expectations about the (high) disposability and (vast) simplicity of blockbusters, critics are objecting to the “Pirates” films simply for failing to conform to their preconceptions. As he so often does, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane makes for a suitably pretentious example:

The people making these sequels are so drenched in the saga that they commit the fatal error of presuming that we are in the same boat—that we have spotless recall of every twist in the earlier films and can barely breathe because of our desperation for more. What they fail to realize is that big summer movies, even the successful ones, are designed to be forgettable, passing through our system at precisely the same rate as a pint of Pepsi. Nothing is left but fizzing nerve ends and a sugary soupçon of rot.

This sort of criticism of “Pirates,” which was also whizzing about with regard to “Dead Man’s Chest,”
strikes me as essentially the throwing up of hands and exclaiming, “Too confusing! Wanna be condescended to! Waaaaaaaah!”, in this case embellished with a soupçon of poseur.

Handily, it also doesn’t hold up. While it’s true that the movies feature constantly shifting allegiances and that its characters are continually betraying one another, if you actually hold said betrayals up to scrutiny they not only make sense on a character level but also operate, on a macro level, as the trilogy’s overt theme. Namely, that Pirates Are Not to be Trusted. Of course, the critics who marshall the “too confusing” argument never once specify what, exactly, they find so baffling. They just complain that they don’t know what’s going on. But given that the movies operate under zero pretense of standing alone, and are meant to be digested as one broad, involved story, this critical fascination seems a little much, and perhaps bespeaks a certain laziness with regard to the press kit. Also, am I the only one who thinks it’s alarming that the film critic in the New fucking Yorker is intimidated by the amount of incident at play in a summer blockbuster? Jeepers.

Go see "Pirates." It’s fun, if you have an attention span.