Pirates of the Carribbean 3; At Wit's End
May 30th 2007 07:06
Pirates of the Carribbean : At World's End
Pirates of the world, unite!
Right to habeas corpus suspended. Right to trial by jury suspended. After the endless litany of woes is read out, the hordes of pirates are hung together. It's the turn of a small child and predictably he starts a singing a song of defiance and the rest of the chained people join in. A British soldier is worried about a possible insurrection and runs to his superior officer, Captain Beckett who calmly tells him to ignore it. The child is hung.
The British Empire, represented by Beckett, is ascendant and rounding up pirates everywhere and promptly hanging, clearing the seas. Beckett has cunningly trapped Davy Jones and therefore, has the services of the Flying Dutchman to squelch the pirate squads. Jack Sparrow is trapped in Davy Jones Locker, a maritime purgatory. Captain Barbarossa decides to rescue him because he plans to raise the Brethren Court, a grand council of the international pirates and all nine pirate lords are required there and Sparrow is one of them. Elizabeth Swann decides to follow him because she is eaten up with guilt. Will Turner wants to rescue his father from the Flying Dutchman. There is plenty of double-crossings, fights and chases, intrigue and action and many parts of it are quite enjoyable and some, like the Calypso episode, are not.
This is the opening scene of Pirates of the Carribean : At World's End and it's in- your-face attempts at commmentary on modern politics is jarringly cringe-worthy. That perhaps is the biggest drawback of the movie. I don't remember much of the first movie but I loved the second one, mainly because, after a prolonged introduction it settled into an uniterrupted romp of thrills, which one could enjoy without bothering oneself with the very knotty story. The third part has some great moments too; like the wedding in the climactic swordsfight which compares favourably with the ballad that Cyrano composed during a duel.
I did not understand the plot of the third movie either and I came back and read the story on the Net, for writing this review even though the story, indeed the very excess of it, does little to elucidate the movie. P3, like the Matrix 3 and the Superman-3 , is dense with story and structure and the architecture of its mythology. Unlike the second part though, this one is awash with allusion and insinuation. Indeed,its painfully obvious subtext forms the cathexis that drove the serpentine narrative.
The British Empire may have had a whole lot of flaws but this movie is a romantic fantasy, not a historical epic, and it is not the history of the Empire but its use as a symbol, not for overbearing authority but for lawful order, that's at stake here. It is true that often unfortunately in romanticism, a legal representative is the villain and the lawbreaker is a hero. From Inspector Javert in Les Miserables on down to the Officer Frank Dixon in the Terminal. And all such infuriatingly stubborn and dense men have the quality of self-destructing at the end. Hugo at least invests Javert with a certain dignity, who commits suicide because the principles that he lived by turn on him and he can't bear the difference. None of the modern directors, whether Spielberg or Joss Whedon or Gore Verbinski can manage that with their villains ( Officer Dixon in The Terminal, the Operative in Serenity and Beckett in P3) and when the villains melt in the time of the crunch, the whole elaborate set up and the boasts seem eminently ridiculous for the audience. Straw men are easy to set up and kill.
The movie is a fantasy of shared subversion and longing for anarchy. The pirates of the world join and unbind Calypso from her human form which will bring back elemental chaose back to the seas. Bring down the empire; let anarchy rule!! The movie is littered with dramatic moments where the emotional lift-off is given by choosing the other side, of soldiers giving up their uniform and joining the pirates. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter! And yes, the hero's tireless search for immortality (a metaphor for permanence of political order), which is still not satiated in this movie leads him to the fountain of Life, the Aqua Vida which is supposed to be in where else but Cuba.
If you have wondered why Left which boasts itself as being a secular, rational, atheistic ideology should join forces with obscurantist ,fundamentalist version of radical Islam, look no further. At World's End is the glorification and romanticisation of the secret fantasy that make such an alliance possible.
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