Posts Tagged ‘pirates’

I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a hundred and thirty-seven minutes of silly pirate fun. It missed some of the magic of the PotC: The Curse of the Black Pearl and lacked some of the elements that sustained PotC: Dead Man’s Chest and PotC: At World’s End. However better than some of the reviews I’ve seen that would suggest it was a far worse film than it is.

The big problem all the sequels to the Pirate of the Caribbean film have is that they will be compared to  the hit that the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was.  You’re never going to be able to recreate the impact of seeing Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow for the first time.

On Stranger Tides starts out well Jack impersonating a Judge could have been played for more laughs but that would have slowed the narrative down.  We’re quickly treated to Jack’s cracking escape sequence followed by Keith Richards appearance as Captain Teague and the cracking fight between Jack and Angelica’s impersonation of Jack.  Jack is Shanghaied by Angelica aboard Blackbeard’s ship we get into the meat of the film’s plot.

Everyone is off to sea in a race between three competing sides to get to the Fountain of Youth first. We have the Revenge with Blackbeard, Angelica, Jack and the missionary Philip against Pirate turned English Privateer Barbossa against the Spanish king’s expedition.

After fighting with mermaids, trekking through jungle, looking for a pair of chalices on a ship loaded with gold balanced on a cliff edge which should have had [Micheal Caine] aboard to say “hang on lads I’ve got an idea”, extracted a tear from a mermaid and had an encounter with the Spanish we get to the climax at the fountain.  Here we have a series of battles followed by a moral dilemma and a cliché that had been sitting around waiting to happen ever since Angelica explained the ritual earlier in the film.  The film wraps up leaving the surviving characters in various situations from which any and all of them can return for future instalments depending on the availability of the actors.

Overall a hundred and thirty-seven minutes of silly pirate fun.  Sadly I have a few quibbles …

My biggest one is that opening cracks along so nicely then once we leave the merry old England of Richard Griffiths’ King George the pace slows down a bit and never recovers.  The plot didn’t create any urgency to the rush to the fountain.  Blackbeard has the prophecy of his death, the English are trying to get there to claim it before the Spanish, Barbossa hopes to find Blackbeard there to take revenge and Jack’s interest has been set up in the earlier films.

Ironically the one thing that could have been used to add pace, the Spaniards intention of destroying the Fountain of Youth, wasn’t revealed and instead was used as  a bit of a damp squib twist at the end.  Had we known their larger, better equipped expedition was going to destroy it everyone else would have had a reason to rush to get their first.  The Spaniards’ were one of the film’s two missed opportunities.

The second missed opportunity was the relationship between Syrena the Mermaid, and Philip the missionary.  Rather than being the new Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann they were relegated to being the plot mechanic to get a mermaid’s tear.  Had Philip been more of a firebrand, possibly establishing the Spaniards’ religious intention to destroy the Fountain as a profane artefact, torn by his love for an inhuman mermaid he could have been a far more interesting addition to the film.  Instead we got a rather bland, more tea please, stereotype who stripped from the waist up presumably to provide some eye candy for the fans saddened by Orlando Bloom’s absence.

Blackbeard could have been a bit more villainous, a bit more irredeemable and could have made more of his swords power.  With Jack and Barbossa around Ian McShane needed to turn his performance up to 11 where as it was sitting around at an 8 or a 9.  His zombified, mystic henchmen also lacked something – they weren’t up to the skeletal pirates of the first film or even the fish men hybrids of the second and third.

My last quibble is that the final battle just didn’t pay off.  I’m not sure why not but it just lacked the energy of the opening.  If it had it could have redeemed the films other flaws.

Those are quibbles though.  I’ve seen far worse films but as I said already this has to compete with the three earlier films.  There were lots of positive things…

Jack Sparrow and Angelica had a real spar.  At times their chemistry lent towards being Carry on up the Caribbean with a high level of double entendre which fortunately really worked to establish them as a former couple who still have a spark.  It was a good idea to pare down the number of characters from the previous films, a few more cameos from smaller parts amongst crews might have been nice but losing lots of the bigger characters gave this story room to breathe.  The old relationships that remained between Jack, Barbossa and Gibbs all worked well.

As a Vue user it was really nice to see some top-notch landscape work with Vue.  I really couldn’t see the joins between virtual and real landscapes.  I may be wrong but I don’t think it was just spectacular jungle backdrops that had been produced in Vue this time but also I think some really nice rocks, cliffs and possibly a few cloudscapes might have too.

So overall I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides wan an enjoyable, Friday night, popcorn pirate movie.

What I really want to do now is watch Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl or play the Lego computer game…

Just watched the latest Doctor Who – The Curse of the Black Spot.  Very much in the monster of the week / concept based science fiction mixed up with pirates.  In theory it had all the elements to be a really good episode.  Unfortunately somewhere along the way something got lost.  I don’t think the problem was that comparing it to Pirates of the Caribbean.  The becalmed pirate ship set up let them get away with a story that was in a nice, self-contained location.  Maybe they were so busy ticking pirate story boxes they lost the spirit of the pirate story?  I expected the pirates themselves to be both bad and scary in their own right but they’d be reduced to paper cut fearing, backboneless jellies who didn’t really come across as having been very naughty let alone worthy of the hangman’s rope.

The twist of the siren turning out to be a spaceship’s automated medical system trying to save the humans was a nice idea.

There were a couple of nods to The Day of the Moon and The Impossible Astronaut.  They felt a little bit heavy-handed in the way they were included as though someone felt we had to be reminded there is an ongoing plot this series in case we might forget.

So personally I felt The Curse of the Black Spot wasn’t a bad Doctor Who but it wasn’t a great one either.

I’ll keep this short Elizabeth: The Golden Age 1: Historical Accuracy 0. The story is a mix of school boy history and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Enjoyable though.

It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day so here is a pirate ship. Made with Vue 6 (which is on sale this week).

I had a less leisurely start to Saturday as I did a mad dash for my food shopping so I could get down to the Albert Dock in Liverpool to see the Bounty II, an oversized replica of the original HMAV Bounty which was making a one day stop to raise funds for the restoration of the Cutty Sark. Despite continuous heavy rain the crowds to see the ship while I were there were large including many children in pirate outfits drawn by the ship’s appearance in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I decided not to go aboard because of the long queue and the inclement weather but did get some good photographs of the ship from.

Just back from watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the second part of the two part follow up to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Enjoyed it. Plot was twisty and did some interesting things with the characters. Great action sequences. Interesting characters. I would have liked more Chow Yun-Fat and Jack Davenport but with so many characters it’s hard to fit them all in. A fair number of characters removed from any future story arcs. Well as removed as any character is in a setting where pretty much anyone can be brought back from the dead and where gods can be trapped in human form.

Some people think there wasn’t enough Jack (Sparrow not the monkey) and that he didn’t appear early enough. However by saving him for awhile they were able to build up plots, other characters’ stories and anticipation. Sometime too much of a good thing can spoil it. The rest of the cast (even the over the top pirates) are the straight men for Jack to bounce off. He’s one of the things that makes Pirates of the Caribbean special. Too much of him though and he’d become annoying or worse ordinary. He is a character who is in danger of suffering from what Gamers refer to as Monty Haul – something many film series suffer from. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Great ship battles. In a realistic film a well fought ship of the line should have held up to two smaller ships a little longer especially when the two smaller ships have just gone toe to toe. But this wasn’t Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World it was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and two large frigates can take a ship of the line in a single pass…

The music was a real overblown, bombastic treat and has move further away from The Peacemaker score that the first Pirates film wasn’t many themes different from.

The post credits sequence while nice story telling didn’t really add a lot. I hope Kim and Darkdwarf and everyone else I went with will forgive me wanting to sit through the credits to the end.

If I had time I’d love to work out how many character triangles there were at work in the plot. Jack, Will and Elizabeth is the most obvious and in many ways is like the love triangle at the heart of Star Wars IV – VI, although in this case (spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen Star Wars and still might) Han doesn’t get the girl the nice boy (turned rebel to save the world) does. A couple of others that spring to mind (although not all big triangles now) include Will, Elizabeth and ‘Bootstrap’; Will, Elizabeth and Norrington; and Beckett, Jack and Davy Jones. Each of these triangles interact to push the story in different directions. Sometimes you don’t know which triangle is driving a character when there are two acting on them at the same time – a situation that affects both Will and Elizabeth at different times and sometimes the same time.

So should they come back for more? I can see there is milage in some of the characters and they’ve set them up for more potential adventure. If they do I hope they are careful not to try and top this one – you can only have so many sea battles in whirl pools. Focusing on a smaller number of characters wouldn’t hurt so they can give them a bigger chunk of screen time each. Avoid the trap of going down the Monty Haul road.

I ment to post this explanation night but I was really tired so I had an early night and couldn’t get to sleep till well past 2AM. Anyway less of my problems you didn’t come here to hear me moan on…

The picture I posted last week for Wordless Wednesday, Duel 2 that several people said looked like a computer game was made using Poser and Vue. It was a rework of an earlier picture of mine, Duel. I decided to change the angle a little so rather than looking at the characters with a conventional photographic angle I’d look down on them from above. I also removed a lot of the objects that were already in the scene as they wouldn’t be visible with a steep downward looking angle on the scene but would be using precious computing resources.

However the image was now rather plain and empty with only a couple of characters on the dock in view so I added some clutter to make the setting more interesting. I also changed the water so it was more dramatic although I think it could still do with some more work. I also used SkinVue to try to improve the character’s look although I’m not certain it really made a lot of difference to this picture, if I improve the lighting it will probably have been worth the effort. I fiddled with the light a bit because the original lighting cast shadows that hid some of the detail in the picture. I may play with the lighting on this one again as I’m not really happy with it yet. Finally I rendered it and posted it here.

The following products were used in making the picture:

• Michael 3 Base (Now Available Free at Daz)
• Michael 3.0 Head & Body Morphs
• Victoria 3.0 Base
• Victoria 3.0 Head & Body Morphs
• Pirate Pack for M3
• Wharf Construction Set: Piers
• Pirate for V3
• Buccaneer Gear
• Swashbuckler Pirate Poses
• Wharf Clutter
• Pilot boat
• Port crane
• Oars and Paddles
• SkinVue6.2
• SkinVue6.2 DAZ Character Plugin

This Follows on from: Characters on the Couch (Part 9). The first part can be found at: Characters on the Couch (Part 1).

The Outlaw Archetype

“Rules are meant to be broken.”

Outlaws seek revenge and revolution. They want to bring about the destruction of what is working. Their tactics are disruption, shock and outrage. They break the rules and buck the system.

At their worst they go completely over the top. Their dark side sees them slip into villainous and evil behaviour. They become criminal outlaws cut off from society. The road to their dark side may see them rebel because of peer pressure or for the sake of fashion rather than because there is a real need.

Robin Hood, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, Meryl Streep in Silkwood. Harley Davidson is the ultimate brand endorsement for the modern outlaw archetype. Most fictional bandits, criminals and assassins are outlaws. Barbossa (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) and John Malkovich’s assassin in In the Line of Fire are both outlaws.

Tags:
writing

I’m blaming the bottle of wine I’ve polished off tonight for the following result…

What kind of Pirate are you?
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