…and this is a 
Ahhhhh…I mean, Arrrrrr
Category: Entertainment • Pirates
Posted on: May 28, 2007 11:30 PM, by PZ Myers
That was a sigh of contentment. I went off to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie with very low expectations—like the last one, I expected an extremely muddled plot, lots of random noise that didn't carry the story forward, and many places where the movie could have been edited down a bit. I was right! But it also had wonderful naval battles, glorious swashbuckling, and finally, the lady lead acquired a bit of ferocity. I just sank down in my seat and savored the unabashed piratey goodness and didn't worry about the details, and all was well.
Except for one thing: finding my favorite character washed up dead on a beach in an early scene in the movie was very disappointing. I wiped away a tear and just imagined that she'd left behind a swarm of progeny that were flourishing off-screen.
Comments
I think POTC 4 should be Kraken vs. Sarlaac. How geek-tastic would that be?!
Posted by: DaveX | May 28, 2007 11:55 PM
I saw the movie over the weekend, and noting that dumbass pirate comic relief #1 says, in regard to your fave character, "it's actually not a fish, it's a cephalopod." I said to my dad on the way out "Oh I think PZ Myers will definitely have something to say about this!"
Posted by: Rheinhard | May 29, 2007 12:04 AM
Won't someone think of the squidies? Deepest condolences PZ.
Posted by: Brian | May 29, 2007 12:37 AM
"Let us not, dear friends, forget our dear friends the cuttlefish..."
Posted by: Chinchillazilla | May 29, 2007 1:55 AM
Great. Thanks ever-so-much for the spoiler Doctor. Geez, some us us haven't been able to get out and buckle our swashes yet and were rooting for the Kraken. You ought to post a spoiler warning or something... Sheesh!
By the way, thanks for the uplifting and thought provoking content.
"There is no god but natural selection, and Darwin and Wallace are it's prophets."
Posted by: Carbonfish | May 29, 2007 2:10 AM
What a waste... I mean, where are you going to find a deep fryer big enough for that?
OEJ
Posted by: One Eyed Jack | May 29, 2007 2:17 AM
This might be a stupid question, but, how do you know that the Kraken is female?
Posted by: Luis | May 29, 2007 2:19 AM
Oh noes!
Come on, you have to precede any such posts with a big SPOILER ALERT sign.
Posted by: Oh, fishy, fishy, fishy, fish! | May 29, 2007 2:47 AM
Dainty tentacles.
Posted by: Simon G. | May 29, 2007 3:49 AM
Here is a site that gives quite a bit of info on pirates. Be sure to check the movie list and the art gallery, where he seems to have a preference for lady pirates.
http://www.geocities.com/captcutlass/index.html
Posted by: bernarda | May 29, 2007 4:20 AM
How did they get away with the caption on the last picture?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6663451.stm
Posted by: MartinC | May 29, 2007 4:48 AM
'twer a right good pirate movie and no mistake about that, I gives it two 'earty Arrrr-Arrrrs...
...but nows I be stuck in pirate mode, and am slated for given a presentation to the board. Arrrrr, somehow I thinks those bilge scum licking sons o salt-cooks be in for a little surprise...
Posted by: a lemur | May 29, 2007 7:21 AM
Pirates AND cephalopods... sounds like SOMEONE has been more involved in this film than he likes to admit. The demise of Kraken was probably just a cover-up.
Posted by: forsen | May 29, 2007 7:33 AM
Simon G., for that comment alone, you have my support in the next "Order of the Molly" vote.
Posted by: xebecs | May 29, 2007 7:46 AM
By being British, of course.
Posted by: MartinM | May 29, 2007 7:48 AM
A lego version of pirates. This time, Kraken attacks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRfxfbYy438&mode=related&search=
Posted by: bernarda | May 29, 2007 8:47 AM
Arrr, and did yer stay through the three hourrrrs of the movie, and the three hourrrrs of credits to see the final after-credit scene?
Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | May 29, 2007 9:18 AM
Minus points-- too long (no editing Oscar for you guys) and a pointless subplot
Bonus points-- lovely to look at, an audience of all ages, and not a hokey predictable ending
Extra points-- Keith Richards' cameo
Posted by: Faithful Reader | May 29, 2007 9:24 AM
SPOILER AHEAD:
a parachute ? WTF ?
:SPOILER BEHIND
Posted by: cleek | May 29, 2007 9:24 AM
"This might be a stupid question, but, how do you know that the Kraken is female?"
Pretty easy. It's a ginormous vagina dentata.
Posted by: Meg | May 29, 2007 9:59 AM
SPOLIER:
If the Pirate Lords were the ones who imprisoned Calypso in human form, how come Sao Feng doesn't know she isn't Elizabeth?
Posted by: mothworm | May 29, 2007 10:47 AM
Well, you can take Steven King's word for it. Sure, he's not talking about the Kraken itself, but the entities have a lot in common.
Posted by: Cyrus | May 29, 2007 10:48 AM
Which subplot do you mean? It was indeed long so I won't defend the editing, but nothing comes to mind that I'd describe that way. Ohhh... do you mean Calypso? Well, maybe it was pointless, I guess, but it does set up that ending.
Which I agree with you about, by the way. At first, I thought it was a pretty bad ending. SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER. They spend all the movie setting up this horrible dilemma for Will, and in the end, he... gets caught by it, and it's not as bad as everyone thought? Wow, how exciting.
But a few hours later my impression of it had softened. This is kind of like a flaw built into adventure movies, where the odds are always impossible but the hero(es) always beat them anyway. For a main character to have a clever plan hidden from the audience or for the bad guy's lieutenant to have a last-minute change of heart that actually turns the tide is expected. What's less expected is for the hero to die or not get the girl or whatever. My impulse was to say that it's lazy writing to not come up with some way out of the problem, but if anything, the reverse is true.
Posted by: Cyrus | May 29, 2007 11:08 AM
So what happened after the credits? I had two kids with very full bladders, because of that we were not hanging around through the credits.
Posted by: ukko | May 29, 2007 11:21 AM
Scene by the sea 10 years later, with Elizabeth waiting for her once-in-a-decade boinking from Orlando Bloom. She has a 10-yr-old brat with her.
Posted by: Philboid Studge | May 29, 2007 11:50 AM
Hey, I didn't have any spoilers in my post. I didn't say who was washed up dead on a beach, you know. It could have been Elizabeth.
As for the brief scene at the end: when the movie was over, SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER! SPOILER! various pirates were dead or were sailing off to new adventures, and one character was notable in the absence of any resolution: Elizabeth. I was kind of peeved, because she had developed into a kind of kick-ass pirate queen, and then...nothing. The last 30 seconds at the end was set ten years later, when we see Elizabeth (who doesn't look a day older!) and find out what's been keeping her busy. It was disappointingly domestic.
There. That's over.
Posted by: PZ Myers | May 29, 2007 11:52 AM
I think this spirit lives on at the Beeb.
Bob
Posted by: Bob O'H | May 29, 2007 11:59 AM
SPOILER ALERT
> ukko : What happens after the credits :
A barely aged Elizabeth strolls non-descript cliffs with a tenish boy singing a pirate song at her side. They watch the sun go down, and a green flash illuminate their faces. The Dutchman appears against the sun, with Will in the rigging.
The End.
Posted by: Abie | May 29, 2007 12:16 PM
Mothworm---"If the Pirate Lords were the ones who imprisoned Calypso in human form, how come Sao Feng doesn't know she isn't Elizabeth?"
The FIRST Pirate Lords imprisoned Calypso some significant number of decades ago. The current Pirate Lords are their heirs, or their heirs' heirs, or something like that. Before a Pirate Lord dies, (s)he passes it along to another person.
Philboid Studge---"Scene by the sea 10 years later, with Elizabeth waiting for her once-in-a-decade boinking from Orlando Bloom. She has a 10-yr-old brat with her."
Actually, it's no longer once in a decade, since having your lover remain true to you for the entire decade breaks the curse. (Although they didn't make that clear in the movie.) The Green Flash represents the return of a soul to the living, in this case freeing Will from his between-the-worlds existence which prohibited Elizabeth from exploiting the obvious loophole of meeting him at sea. (And, to answer the obvious next question, Davy Jones existed in real life because after the whole Calypso/heartcutout affair he didn't bother continuing to actually do his job and sort of sulked around the Seven Seas in a hundred-year-long temper tantrum.)
Posted by: Kyra | May 29, 2007 1:22 PM
Don't forget to visit http://www.talklikeapirate.com/
Sept. 19 isn't far off.
Posted by: Paul | May 29, 2007 1:50 PM
I thought that, too, but some of the dialogue (Gibbs, I think) makes it seem like it was within living memory of those present, and that he, at least, was there. I suppose Sao Fen could be an heir, although he seems at least as old as Barbarossa, and has been around long enough to have his own empire. Which also makes me wonder how Sparrow gets to be a lord. He doesn't seem to be in command of anything.
On another topic, did anyone else find Beckett's demise inexplicable?
Still enjoyed it, though. Elizabeth kicked ass.
Posted by: mothworm | May 29, 2007 2:08 PM
That bugged me the first time I saw it, but luckily I had to take my dad to see it too, and I think I got it now. It was, I think, the first Pirate Lords that imprisoned her, and it's been a few hundred years since then.
And when Sao Feng starts thinking Elizabeth is Calypso, everyone else has all these Secret Glances, like, "Should we tell him? Ehh, no, he's a creepy perv."
Posted by: Chinchillazilla | May 29, 2007 3:04 PM
One thing that could have made it better: Jack's MacGuffin should have been his hat.
Also: it's a movie. They're under absolutely no obligation to be true to any legend they're ripping off. So, for example, they don't mention breaking the curse of the Flying Dutchman, so it probably can't be broken. The Dread Pirate Roberts gets 'is one day of nookie every ten years, until such time as 'is 'art be stabbed by 'is successor.
Posted by: stogoe | May 29, 2007 3:11 PM
One thing that could have made it better: Jack's MacGuffin should have been his hat.
Also: it's a movie. They're under absolutely no obligation to be true to any legend they're ripping off. So, for example, they don't mention breaking the curse of the Flying Dutchman, so it probably can't be broken. The Dread Pirate Roberts gets 'is one day of nookie every ten years, until such time as 'is 'art be stabbed by 'is successor.
Posted by: stogoe | May 29, 2007 3:11 PM
The death of the Kraken didn't upset me as much as the death of HAL9000, but that may be because I like machines much more than I like flesh-beings of any stripe. The Kraken was pretty cool, for a meatbag, and its inexplicable death was in my opinion the only real flaw in Pirates 3. "Hum. Really no place for her in this movie; I guess she'll have to die for no evident reason."
Although, personally, I like to think that she died from alcohol poisoning after consuming the Black Pearl-- and Jack Sparrow's ENORMOUS stash of rum...
Posted by: Richard Clayton | May 29, 2007 3:30 PM
"how do you know that the Kraken is female?"
Pretty easy. It's a ginormous vagina dentata.
That would be vagina radula.
Posted by: CCP | May 29, 2007 3:36 PM
The Kraken's death was explained - Beckett forced Davy Jones to kill it. There was a scene where this was alluded to (Beckett referred to the Kraken only as Jones' "pet"). Although, I do like the alcohol poisining idea. Very plausible.
Also, there's been a major controversy over at imdb.com about whether the curse was broken or not. Apparantly the writers said they meant for the curse to be broken, but no one can seem to provide a source for these comments. I didn't get the impression that it was broken until other people brought up the idea, but it could have just been left ambiguous in the final cut on purpose.
Posted by: kellbelle1020 | May 29, 2007 3:49 PM
Do you go to an opera for the plot? Broadway for character development? Picasso for realistic portraiture?
Pirates 2 kicked ass!
Posted by: frog | May 29, 2007 4:15 PM
Alas, ye scurvy frog, this be the third film ta' feature Cap'n Jack Sparrow. Ye be warned once, aye, but ye'll walk the plank the next time ye spout such bilge.
Posted by: stogoe | May 29, 2007 5:04 PM
I thought of you, PZ, during the Kraken scene. I laughed heartily when someone called it a fish, and the one-eyed pirate piped up, "it's actually a cephalopod."
Posted by: uccellina | May 29, 2007 7:28 PM
PZ! I thought of you three times during POC 3...and I even mentioned you to my girlfriend and the friend we were watching the movie with... First during the Kraken, then during the cuttlefish lines, and THEN at the end, because Davy Jones in octopus form actually BREATHED THROUGH HIS SIPHONS! (Which i thought was completely great....)
Anyway....
Posted by: TankDiveGirl | June 1, 2007 3:50 PM