Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Did anyone bother?

i know a few people who saw it and none of them enjoyed it. i can't imagine any person watching the trailers for this and thinking 'looks like a good time'

it had the biggest international weekend ever though, so apparently people cant get enough of this stuff... cutthroat island was before its time!

I saw it on Saturday morning. I've loved the last 3 movies (go on, laugh)..I was interested at first when I saw Tim Powers book tied in.

But this was soulless, joyless, and boring. There was no high adventure, no cheeky fun, and nothing at all real between any of the characters

They cheaped out on the 3D and as a result it's murky & muddy..the plot was so patchwork it was almost incomprehensible...just, ugh.

Al Swearengen as Blackbeard was the only highlight, but not enough of him to matter. Cruz was wooden.

No Gore Verbinski, no Ornaldo Bloomps, no Keira... that pretty much sunk it. (lol)

yeah i mean, i saw the first movie and enjoyed it a lot - missed out on the next two but i could see them being good, but like you say this just looked totally wooden & joyless

I didn't think it was all that awful, actually. I liked it better than the third one anyway. The plot was pretty incomprehensible, but I feel like pretty much all of them have been and I don't really look for a sensible plot from these. (Although I give this one credit for not trying to cram three movies worth of plot into one) I look for campy Depp, a few good swashbuckling scenes, and some ott pirate-ness. I mean, I wouldn't call this a "good" movie, but it kept me entertained. Like the whole series though, it could have been about 20 minutes shorter and all the better for it. The lazy 3D which rendered everything so muddy and the completely unnecessary love story subplot between the mermaid and the Christian dude were my biggest complaints. On the other hand, the mermaid girl was really cuet. Basically I went in expecting it to be complete shit, but was mildly surprised by it not being completely awful and being better than the third one.

I fell asleep at one point.

I think that Verbinski had a lot of playfulness and nostalgic comedy references that just werent there in this...even the leaping around & swordfights were mostly longshots..it took away all the fun & left a paycheck in its place.

See, I felt like the longshots improved the fight scenes, I hated the quick-cut close-ups in the last couple flicks. The longshots reminded me more of old-timey pirate movies.

But it was too short to get any joy from it, and I like some facial reactions & character interplay...I felt like marshall was just treating it as a token gesture, without really *getting* it

maybe Im reading too much into it

I don't know, I don't really feel like arguing much about a movie I didn't really care about anyway. I think my really, really low expectations going in (my wife had to pretty much bribe me to go see this with her) allowed me to enjoy it more than I would if I had been actually anticipating it.

I will rep for #3...yes it is bloated but so much awesome pirate-nerdery..and great moments like "Hoist the colors" sung at the hanging, Davy Jones & Calypso, William freeing his Dad, Keira giving her captains speech, Keef & the pirate counsel, Chow Yun Fat!...I know it's a fat pig of a movie, but I can still rewatch & get a lot of joy out of it

but yeah, no sense arguing over this one, it's lowered the bar too much for me to care overly

well bugger me I actually enjoyed this.

Yeah this is pretty decent. Too dark tho! I can't really see what's going on half the time. Watch this movie only in a pitch black room.

yeah we had the misfortune of seeing it in 3D, talk about murky

Yeah I was gonna say, I'm guessing this was in 3D, judging by the gratuitous shots of swords stabbing towards the camera.

I never would've guessed in a million years that this is the most expensive film ever made:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

Wow indeed. I don't even remember that movie (I can't really tell which Pirates of the Caribbean I have seen...).

I never would have guessed. I always thought "Tangled" still topped the list (which was itself surprising news), but according to this chart this forgettable pirate sequel cost over $100 million more. Seriously? Wow.

There are some other really surprising movies high up in that list! The live action "Beauty and the Beast?" "Solo?" "Justice League?" At a certain point it's gonna be cheaper to just skip CGI and train talking fish to sing or teach Ben Affleck to shoot lasers or whatever.

I was at WDW when they were animating Tangled and saw some test footage and was like 'wow, that's like some Veggie Tales-level bad animation, holy shit' and this clearly is not reflected in the final film which has long led me to believe they did a massive overhaul on the thing at some point and would explain the $$$.

Is it the CGI that make the Pirate movies that costly or did they have to build "real" ships or whatever "classic" movie sets ?
Also I suppose J. Depp and all the Marvel movies actors don't come cheap...

xpost I didn't even know what Tangled was and had to look it up !

I imagine, re: Pirates, it's the old adage about not working with children or animals (Depp) and shooting on water.

But yeah, I'm sure reshoots and whatnot inflate some of these costs (Solo, Justice League, etc.)

LOL @ the number of completely forgettable live-action Disney movies on that list.

the maelstrom scene in potc3 involved -- as well as a fvckton of (good) CGI obv -- the largest physical model set ever built iirc, involving two life-size ships w.many articulated elements, the whole on a variety of gimbals, able to function while water was being jetted in all directions

potc3 is good not bad, ditto tangled: despite lovejoy (always good in everything) potc4 is overlong and boring sadly

I like "Tangled," I think it's funny and perhaps the most underrated of its ilk.

Just reading the wiki about On Stranger Tides, the thing that seems to be unique about it was that it was shot with 3D camera in an outside environment? That is, not using bluescreen. Perhaps that made it so complex and expensive?

Which is the kind of outsized spectacle that only someone who's directed mostly musicals could fully capture on camera.

At World's End came out three years before Tangled - the latter was never at the top of the list.

Obviously all of these films made a lot of money, which is why there's another one after this, and another in the works.

I could have sworn Tangled was on top of the list at one point, I remember it because it was so surprising. Of course, all these numbers are make-believe and unverified anyway.

xpost You raise a good point. There have been a handful of musicals in the new 3D era, why has nobody made a giant spectacular 3D musical yet? Or did I just forget about it?

Oh! Calcutta! 3D: WANGS FLY @ U FACE

needs more gimbals

Moulin Rouge would totally have been 3D if the tech had been there at the time.

I only saw Madagascar 3 in 2D, I can imagine that one of the most amazing musical numbers in it would be head-popping in 3D

The catch: it's set to Fireworks.

LOL, as I was reading your post I was like 'okay, how did DreamWorks manage to taint the scene being described?'

My first guess was 'showstopping musical number takes a quick break so several characters can fart at one another'.

I was at WDW when they were animating Tangled and saw some test footage and was like 'wow, that's like some Veggie Tales-level bad animation, holy shit' and this clearly is not reflected in the final film which has long led me to believe they did a massive overhaul on the thing at some point and would explain the $$$.

That's how any 3d animation works - up until the last run of design/rendering, they can pretty much manipulate everything in real-time as far as placing characters, syncing dialogue, etc. and once everything's good they actually render it with the real textures, facial expressions, highly detailed 3d models, lighting, etc

Back in the Toy Story days I'm pretty sure the first cut that was presented was practically stick figures moving around a vague blur

Half of the reason Terminator 3 is so high on the list despite being less visually interesting than virtually every other entry in the franchise is Arnold's salary was 1/4 of the budget

Actor salaries on anything that's a sequel to a successful film bumps the total cost up a bunch, unless it's a labor of love or they decide to negotiate for a post-release payout

supposedly Johnny Depp made $55 million for this particular film so uh...