Pirates Aaaarrrrr Entertaining

I missed out on seeing the kids tonight. I started getting a migraine at work before coming home and by the time I made it home it was getting to be unbearable. So I downed some extra strength Excedrin, sequestered myself to the bedroom, doused the lights and slept for almost four hours. I'm still not feeling 100%, but at least now I'm able to function. So my plan is to grab something to eat, put up a quick post (using material I wrote over the weekend) and then head back to bed.

I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End the other night. I know what you're thinking, but JamesF, you have to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest first (what's that? You weren't going to say that? And add to that you couldn't care less and have already closed the browser since it's another movie review? I can see that point of view I suppose). Well, I watched Dead Man's Chest back when it was released over the summer, but evidently never wrote anything about it (I know, shocker). Now I know based on user review polls that people didn't like these two movies as much as the first one, and that they liked the third one the least of all. But I have to say I found all these films to be highly entertaining. I will admit to having an issue when I started watching At World's End since I couldn't remember all the minute details that occurred in Dead Man's Chest, but it doesn't take much to get back up to speed.

It's pretty obvious they filmed Dead Man's Chest and At World's End at the same time. And I imagine this worked out well for them, because even though At World's End didn't break box office records like they were hoping it would the movie still made some serious money (yes, it barely recouped it's production cost of 300 million domestically, but it made almost a billion dollars worldwide). Now think about that for a second. At World's End cost 300 million dollars to make. Three hundred million dollars. Add to that the 225 million it cost to make Dead Man's Chest and that's over half a billion dollars to basically tell one story. That's quite simply an insane amount of money. Was it worth it? I'm not sure the end product looks like a half a billion dollars, but I will admit I thoroughly enjoyed the movies. The movies are fun and don't take themselves too seriously. You get your money's worth too, both movies are long (for movies these days anyway) since Dead Man's Chest is two and a half hours and At World's End is almost three hours. And hey, Johnny Depp really does a good job with the role of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Now being a movie about Pirates there's a lot of backstabbing and double crosses going on throughout the movie. In fact I can see how people might have had some trouble following it seeing as how in At World's End alliances change every couple of minutes. I don't know why I was surprised by this, but from watching some of the out takes it's obvious that a lot of the movie was green screened. Given the shooting local would be out on a boat, this makes sense. And I think it's a testament to how good of a job they do with the backgrounds that this never really occurred to me while watching the movie itself.

I would say the Pirate movies definitely fall into the big blockbuster category. They're big over the top epic stories with dashes of humor thrown into the mix. I think unlike some block busters though the story that's being told isn't too bad either. Sure, it's completely unrealistic, but it plays within it's own set of rules and does so very well. In fact, I would say the only thing about the movies I didn't like that much was Keira Knightley. She's too wafer thin for my tastes, and while she does a decent enough job acting at being tough, she's simply not really believable in the role. But that's about the only real flaw I have with the movies. Oh yea, if you left and didn't stay until after the credits of At The World's End then you missed a minor scene. It doesn't add much to the story, but it does end up putting more of a traditional Disney spin on the movie.