Review

Pirates of the Caribbean

You think Terminator 3 was excellent? Naw, it was just good. Okay, quite good. But it wasn’t excellent. You thought it was excellent because everything else that has come out recently has been such dreck. But you’re in luck, because there is a wonderfully stupendousely excellent movie out right now. Which one? Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Truly excellent. Sadly, the preview for Haunted Mansion, while intriguing in that it shows Disney is taking their Imagineering-movie crossovers to new levels (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, anyone?) looks far less excellent. More like bad.

Here’s what my favorite geeky critic, MaryAnn Johanson, has to say about Pirates:

Forget that this is based on a ride at Disney World, and a pretty sorry one, at that — know that it’s a wonderfully exhausting, refreshingly unironic, delightfully old-fashioned swashbuckler. And it’s funny as hell, the funniest movie so far this year. And it’s scary, and exciting, and prankish, with a seemingly never-ending capacity to surprise. It may even be — much as it pains me to have to admit this about a Jerry Bruckheimer production — the hands-down best flat-out, full-blooded, guns-ablazin’ adventure movie to come out of Hollywood since… since… since, she sputtered, grasping for a comparison to do the film justice… since Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I would recommend seeing it now, in a crowded theater. While I generally like seeing movies a week after they’re released, in the afternoon, in a fairly empty theater, I feel that the wonderful comedy of this movie would have been better served if I had had a couple hundred other people to laugh along with me. So don’t wait for the DVD or the cheap theaters, go see this movie now. It really, truly, rocks. Johnny Depp is insanely brilliant (brilliantly insane?), Orlando Bloom is quite a swordsman, and Keira Knightley is a beautiful pleasure.

7 replies on “Pirates of the Caribbean”

  1. You think Terminator 3 was excellent? Naw, it was just good. Okay, quite good. But it wasn’t excellent. You thought it was excellent because everything else that has come out recently has been such dreck.”

    No, I think it’s excellent because it’s about the best dystopian scifi movie since… Uh… Okay, my brain is not supplying me with anything other than T2, and I’m sure there was something else between now and then. And because I think what they did with the Terminator mythology and timeline deserves the title of excellent.

    My views are in now way colored by my being a lunatic fangirl, of course.

    That said, you are absolutely right about Pirates, which is easily the most brilliant movie thus far this summer. (I have high hopes for the 3D Spy Kids, though…)

  3. You’re right… It’s all about Gattaca. It was filmed right by my house too (at Cal Poly)!

    I may be biased by the fact that I did a 20 page paper on the mythology of Star Wars, but I think that series (at least the original trilogy) was pretty darn good as well.

Comments are closed.