Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

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Post by Ben » May 25th, 2011, 6:33 pm

Oh, yes, agreed.

London was well done, and I liked Uncle Vernon as the King, but I hear ya on the supernatural and mermaid stuff. I also felt the religious guy wasn't really there for any reason other that to put an Orlando Bloom type in there, though he was never really used until near the end when we're then supposed to care about him.

Let's just say it was fun enough that I'd give Pirates 5 a chance, though they do need to spice things up a little more if they're going to make it past the current goal of at least six films.

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Post by EricJ » May 25th, 2011, 7:45 pm

Expect that goalpost to be moved depending on the final results--
What killed #3, according to execs, wasn't the box office (after all, it had an all-time record breaking weekend! :P ), but the fact that the audience had such a bad aftertaste of the movie that the merchandise was dead in the water.
As already noted, we wouldn't have gotten this movie at all except for the attempted Disneyland-grab.

Here, the reaction seems to be, as AICN put it, aggressively average: There's not as much open hostility as there was to the "Twelve Jacks, and Tia turns into Godzilla" movie, and the merchandise seems to be doing okay, just that the mermaids seem to be selling more than the pirates.
As Ben joked, they are on the verge of sinking their own ship, and if Depp says (outside of press interviews) that he'd like to quit, he shouldn't feel he should continue on account of us.

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Re: Pirates Of The Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides

Post by Dacey » May 25th, 2011, 11:00 pm

You know, I'm aware that there was a lot of dislike surrounding AWE from certain people, Eric, but I have yet to hear any fan of the series say that "Stranger Tides" was "better."

Granted, I haven't seen it yet (I should be going tomorrow), but I've been hearing that the thrills and mind-blowing special effects of the first three just aren't to be found here.
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Re: Pirates Of The Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides

Post by droosan » May 25th, 2011, 11:15 pm

On Stranger Tides is a 'smaller-scale' movie than the last two; no doubt.

.. but I don't see anything wrong with that, in and of itself.

I, too, had read several critical reviews before seeing the film .. but I still managed to thoroughly enjoy it. :)

To continue the 'Indiana Jones' allusion .. the first film in both series is simply on a higher level. The follow-up installments reach for those same heights, and come up short -- but they're still fun 'popcorn' flicks.

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » May 25th, 2011, 11:17 pm

Just don't mention aliens, Droo...

We all expect tombs and skulls in an Indy film.

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Re: Pirates Of The Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides

Post by EricJ » May 25th, 2011, 11:28 pm

Dacey wrote:You know, I'm aware that there was a lot of dislike surrounding AWE from certain people, Eric, but I have yet to hear any fan of the series say that "Stranger Tides" was "better."
Granted, I haven't seen it yet (I should be going tomorrow), but I've been hearing that the thrills and mind-blowing special effects of the first three just aren't to be found here.
Well, that's the point: AWE was near three hours of Just Plain Wrong; OST, from most accounts so far, is just "average". (The defenders say that it's nice NOT to have all the extravagantly loopy Will-Kate-&-Davey mythos-navelgazing that sank AWE--and just mess around in boats and action scenes with no particular plot obligation--while its detractors say that there's not really much left in it.)
And Average, while not Good, is always a step up from Wrong...."Better" may be a relative term, but at least Better isn't Worse. :)

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Post by Ben » May 26th, 2011, 2:47 pm

AWE obviously still had many people that enjoyed it, or else they would never have gone and seen the new one! As for me, by the end of it there had been so many double, triple and quadruple crossings that I just gave up trying to follow what was going on and just enjoyed Jack's swash and buckling up in the sailing masts of the ships being torn up in the sea storm.

It was all so ludicrous that all anyone could do was just to sit back and watch, which a lot of people I've spoken to agree with. If AWE had damaged the series irrevocably, OST wouldn't be doing the kind of business, ensuring a Pirates 5 is made, that it has been doing. Making an exceedingly bloated budget back twice over before the end of the first week? That's almost unheard of, and doesn't suggest that the wide majority of cinema audiences have had enough Jack and will continue to sail with him however choppy the waters.

There...enough sea-faring analogies, but I must ask - amongst your usual rant of consciousness - who the heck "Kate" is!? Do you mean Elizabeth?

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Post by Daniel » May 26th, 2011, 3:18 pm

Middleton?! ;)

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Re: Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

Post by Dacey » May 28th, 2011, 11:01 pm

Saw "On Stranger Tides" on Thursday (was supposed to be able to catch Panda 2 afterwards, but alas, was unable to), and have to say that I found it to be surprisingly underwhelming. Not just not nearly as good as the first three movies underwhelming. Just plain old lacking.

Which is not to say that I "hated" it, or that it was a terrible film, but it just felt like pretty lazy storytelling for the most part. Verbinski, in my opinion, was probably not appreciated enough for his work on the first three. The POTC movies bend all sorts of genres together, and he was able to pull it off very well. Rob Marshall's directing just seemed by the numbers, delivering very few stunts that really stood out (although there were still some to be found). None of the action sequences were especially special, either. The chase through London felt like it was going to be a huge set piece, and then it just sort of...ended. And most of the scenes didn't feel all that creative. Even the film's best scene--involving scary mermaids--will seem familiar to anyone who's seen the fourth Harry Potter movie.

And despite Depp taking "center stage" this time, there weren't all that many classic Jack Sparrow moments to be found. Sometimes he almost seemed to be playing the straight man, and that just felt weird! Also, he seemed surprisingly inactive, considering how much he's in the film. Jack's always supposed to be the "man with the plan," and here he never seemed to have one, and whenever he did, it was easy to predict ahead of time.

I thought that Rush was great. His storyline was probably one of the more interesting, as we were never sure why Barbossa was acting the way that he was, or what his motives were. When they were revealed, it all made sense, and I thought that his scenes with Depp were especially fun.

New characters really didn't leave much of an impact on me. Biggest letdown, obviously, was Ian freaking McShane as Blackbeard, which I expected to be awesome. Instead, as Ben said, he was just grouchy, which is weird, since everyone involved with the film has been boasting about what a scary villain Blackbeard would be in this. I mean, you have Ian freaking McShane as Blackbeard on a ship full of zombies! They could've done some really cool stuff with that, but instead they did...nothing.

As for Cruz, I was never really sure how the audience was supposed to feel about her. Honestly, Keira and Depp had much more romantic spark going on in DMC than they ever did. And the script kept trying to set up how much Jack Sparrow "cared" about her, and yet he treated her horribly in their last scene together. I'm aware that the scene was meant to get a laugh out of the audience, but jeez, that was inconsistent behavior even by Sparrow's standards.

Not much needs to be said about the religious guy, other than that his character was boring. I found it annoying that during the climatic scene that we were more focused on him than we were on the battle that was going on.

I could say more, but I'll just wrap this overly long post up with the most important thing: The movie didn't explain anything about where Blackbeard got his power. I guess that it had something to do with his sword, but since they never told us that was the reason, I can only be making an assumption. And how did he get the Black Pearl into a bottle? Where did he get the Jack Sparrow voodoo doll? And why did the mermaid grow legs all of a sudden at one point? Oh, wait, that last one was obvious: To save special effects money.

Anyway, I'll stop. I'm possibly being overly harsh here, but even with my lowered expectations, I guess I was still just a little letdown. I guess I'm just saying that it didn't really feel like a POTC film, just an imitation of one. When DMC came out, you sat down in the theater knowing that you were in for a big show, and it delivered on that promise, which is why it's my favorite in the series. AWE I may have had one or two small complaints about, but for the most part I thought it was a great conclusion to the stuff that was set up in DMC, with a pretty darn incredible climatic battle to finish the whole thing off. OST just felt like everyone was going by the motions, with no one really seeming to give it their full effort. In other words, it felt like what it was: A cash grab.

Having said all that, again, I didn't "hate" the film. I would still be game for a POTC 5. They just need to go all out with it. I know that people like to say that "less is more," but in the case of these movies, less only ends up being...well, less. ;)
Last edited by Dacey on May 29th, 2011, 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by EricJ » May 29th, 2011, 1:47 am

And despite Depp taking "center stage" this time, there weren't all that many classic Jack Sparrow moments to be found. Sometimes he almost seemed to be playing the straight man, and that just felt weird! Also, he seemed surprisingly inactive, considering how much he's in the film. Jack's always supposed to be the "man with the plan," and here he never seemed to have one, and whenever he did, it was easy to predict ahead of time.
Well, that's probably because it was based on a book, where Jack was either inserted by the screenwriters, or had to split the book character's activity with the missionary character--
Which's one good thing, in that the screenwriters had an existing source-material structure to work from, and didn't need to go off onto their own blue-skying like #3 did...But also means we have Sparrow basically playing somebody else's character, and can only put his own shticks into the film where convenient.

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Re: Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

Post by droosan » May 29th, 2011, 8:29 am

I suppose the 'ultra-low budget' movies that I work on day-to-day might make a mediocre movie look great, by comparison .. but I honestly didn't think On Stranger Tides was all that bad. :|

---------------

BTW, EricJ .. The Curse of the Black Pearl was a pre-existing work, too; the script had been written as a 'stand-alone' pirate movie nearly ten years prior to its release (when Cut-Throat Island scuttled its chances for a green-light). References to the park ride were peppered in only after Disney bought the script.

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Post by Ben » May 29th, 2011, 3:43 pm

Good points, Dacey!

I'd pretty much go along with what you said (and have done in my posts above), though I would be up for Pirates 5 too (and actually think that has a better chance of being better).

It's also nice, though, to see someone else who thinks Dead Man's Chest is the best in the series. As I've said before around here, me likes that one because it kind of reminds me of the classic Disney adventures like Treasure Island and, especially, Swiss Family Robinson. Jack's intro, the brilliant escape from the "jails" hanging off the side of the cliff, and the many sword fights in and on incredible locations and props, just made it all fun. Curse was actually quite low budget, but with DMC they could spend what they needed to make a bigger movie, before the overbloated script contrivances of AWE came into play.

Cut-Throat Island, which got a bit of new love after Curse came out (check the DVD cover for a Pirates poster ripoff), is also a lot of fun. I'd kind of like to see a bit more of that kind of pirate film in the next one, if they're going to keep the series fresh enough to continue to, or past, the proposed six films.

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Post by Ben » July 9th, 2011, 1:29 pm

Pirates 5 is on...now they just have to agree to a big payday to bring its hero on board:
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=31404&WT

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Re: Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

Post by Dacey » August 8th, 2013, 4:31 pm

Here we go again... :(

http://animatedviews.com/2013/pirates-5 ... dget-cuts/

Now watch them promote it a huge epic blockbuster, only for the "action scenes" to be short and end abruptly like they did last time. :roll:
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Re: Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise

Post by Dan » October 2nd, 2014, 6:30 pm

Screen Rant is reporting that Queensland, Australia will serve as the primary shooting location for the fifth film and that principal photography will begin February 2015.

It appears Disney and the region had been in negotiations for a while, back when Disney was going to back a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to be directed by David Fincher before it fell through. Queensland is fronting $21.6 million towards the budget to secure the fifth Pirates filming there, the continent's "largest ever contribution to the financing of a major film" according to Queensland Senator George Brandis, with the film in return expected to bring in $100 million to the region in providing "thousands of local jobs".

http://screenrant.com/pirates-caribbean ... alia-2015/

The fifth film will also be subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales, as announced by the film's directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (previous credit is the Oscar nominated foreign indie feature Kon-Tiki).

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