topsy-turvyland

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End opens with a scene so startling and dark that it's hard not to believe the film is going to be serious. The only clue is the sheer over-the-Disney-topness of it. Hundreds of filthy captives - including piratical peglegs, old women, young girls, children, grannies - are lined up in a sort of procession, shuffling slowly towards a gallows on which hang a row of gibbets. Everything is grey; everyone is filthy. Prisoners stand docile under the nooses; each has a noose put round their neck; and when the executioner pulls the lever, with a sickening thud there are six sets of feet dangling through open trapdoors.

This goes on and on, prisoners queueing as far as the eye - or camera - can see with no despair, hope, or even fear visible among the condemned. Someone reads out a proclamation while the hangings go on: rights cancelled include the right to free assembly, the right to this, the right to that; and any person suspected of fraternising with, harbouring or associating with, let alone being, a pirate will be hanged.

Pan back over the crowd of noble, brave, oppressed prisoners.

A beautiful boy is then led up to the gallows, so short that he just looks up at the noose swinging in the breeze. Someone has to bring him a barrel to stand on and lift him onto it. The little boy turns over an old silver coin in his hand, and starts singing to himself. He sings louder; it becomes a proper song. One by one the prisoners on the gallows start singing with him; then the crowd sings. There is an incredible welling of song, which becomes a wall of song, which is thrilling and moving, and you know that these are brave people who aren't afraid to die.

The hand pulls the lever. The boy's silver coin tumbles to the ground beneath the gallows, where it spins and flashes. Pirates 3 has begun.

Now, this movie is nearly three hours long. The plot is convoluted, over-complicated and full of holes, the main one of which I can't describe as it would give the end away (but remember it! It's at the end). There are too many characters and too many things going on, and there is no consistency in how people behave. Of course it is an action movie. Adventure and thrills give way only to jokes, asides, gags and spectacular fights. The body count is appalling, which is a real complaint I think. And all through the film the pirates are (of course) the good guys. (Pause for a quote from Nicholas Barber in the Independent:

"The only point that's completely clear... is that the people who murder and pillage for a living are the good guys, while the people who want to uphold the law are the bad guys, presumably because they have smart uniforms and drink lots of tea. Beyond that, it would take more than a map and a compass to navigate your way from one end of the plot to the other.

"In no particular order, then... Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, last seen being gobbled up by a sea monster, is marooned in a desert purgatory. Geoffrey Rush's Captain Barbossa is also back from the dead, and he wants to convene something called the Brethren Court. The fish-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is now in league with the dastardly, tea-drinking East India Company...")

This interested me as I was watching: the way in which piracy - or 'Piracy' - is constructed to be all about freedom, longing, nostalgia. The piracy element, of course, is rooted in the transgrssiveness of even feeling this nostalgia, in our rejection of the world which we ourselves have, in fact, built. The condemned prisoners at the beginning are ourselves. So, freeing us from land, untrapping us from our real selves and lives, and slipping loose our mortal spans, Captains Sparrow and Barbossa take us back to...babyhood. Freedom indeed! That was probably the last time when we were allowed this hazy a grasp of the rules, when everything was this unclear, when there was a Big World in which we'd be able - if not for the terrible tea-drinking grownups - to do Whatever We Wanted.*

At least half the characters have by this stage been brought back from the dead in some way. There's a moment in the film that acknowledges this: someone (I forget who) says to Captain Jack Sparrow, "The world isn't as big as it used to be," and he answers, "Oh, the world's just as big. There just isn't as much in it."

Well, there is more in this. The piratical world is fleshed out to bursting point - including the underworld, where they must go to bring back Captain Jack Sparrow. Every concept in Pirates comes with its own gags, and this bit comes with the Green Flash, the Being-Johnny-Depp hallucination sequences, the stones that turn into crabs - which turn out to be Calypso's crabs - the spirits of the drowned, and the cryptic map you have to turn ("down is up"). The journey back from World's End is one of my favourite bits. The spaced-out Jonathan Pryce floating in his purgatorial dinghy was particularly good, I thought.

We loved it. If Pirates 1 was a relatively simple story about humans, and Pirates 2 was an over-complicated story mainly about special effects and prosthesis, Pirates 3 achieves a complete synthesis: an utterly impossible plot, humans cheerfully interacting with computer projections, and a little too much of all of it. Just like the Nine Pieces of Eight (first seen spinning beneath the gallows - loved those). In the last film it all seems to come together: each insane twist of the plot, taking us that bit further from any conceivable resolution, becomes part of the vast joke that is Pirates. The Pirate Lords, from every corner of the world, are glorious in their cliched verisimilitude. Loved 'em. Keith Richards as Jack's dad? Loved 'im, there was nothing that wasn't working about that. Calypso? Loved 'er. Our favourite was the scene between her and Davy Jones, which was strangely moving (and I don't mean churning). So Orlando Bloom has no character. What would he do with a character out there on the Pirate Seas?

In fact, it is the film's ability to rise above the need for character that is so delicious. The people who really need characters (and I'm speaking loosely here) have them (sort of): Captain Barbossa, Jack Sparrow, and the baddie English guy. Every new affront to the sensibilities is a triumph: this is both why the movie is full of jokes about the number of characters brought back rom the dead, and why the jokes work.

It's all really meta. And it's fun.

* The films are also not without their debts to the Disney animation of Peter Pan, even though the pirates were the baddies in that. It is essentially the same sort of thing.

note from management: the reason there are no pictures with this post is that, depite foolish hours of searching, I can't get the pictures I want. They would be the opening scene, the moment (not to give anything away) when Jack is released from the underworld, or the dead souls floating in the sea.