Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård

Have I Seen It Before: I remember it ending. I remember Keith Richards. I had to have been here.

Did I Like It: It’s the same plot-gorged drudgery that weighs down a lot of trilogy closers. So many people are switching sides, seemingly at the drop of a hat, that the screenwriters are seriously over-estimating our desire to keep up with these matters. That might be enough to treat simply as white noise, but the real let-down here is the complete surrender to CGI. Did any of us realize that the secret sauce of these movies up until this point was not Johnny Deep looking like a lunatic, but in fact that in a year beginning with the number 2 a major studio would have any interest in—or the negligence to—allowing a movie to shoot on the actual ocean. Those days are long since gone, even by the third movie. I mourn when I might actually watch the following films.

We’ve all spent some time re-evaluating Johnny Depp, and rightly so. He’s maybe/probably not guilty of everything he’s ever been accused of, but he does seem like a lot, and that he’s long since lost whatever spark made him unpredictable in these films, and legitimately great in stuff like Ed Wood (1994). You know who’s not talked about enough—especially since he was almost completely absent from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)—in these films? Geoffrey Rush. Even when things were far better than they had any right being—in the first Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), all the way through any future films with which we might be threatened by this series, he never looks like he is having anything less than fun. These movies might have always been a bit beneath him, but he will never, ever let us know. I admire that much at least.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was such a surprise experience, one couldn’t help but be far more curious about the sequel. Far more curious than anyone was about the original when it first came out. Throw in the decision to produce this and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) together, a la Back to the Future - Part II (1989) and Back to the Future - Part III (1990), I was certainly sold.

Did I Like It: Even at the time, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. There was just something missing, and it is only at this viewing that I am making any kind of effort to decide why. The simplest explanation is that, while most of the creative team is back, Hans Zimmer has replaced Klaus Badelt as composer. Zimmer is one of the all-time great film composers, but there was a special magic to Badelt’s score that only re-appears here as quotes of Badelt’s motif. It is a mercenary job, and a great example of just how important a film’s score can be to its total success.

But I think the problems will go deeper than that, and it goes back to that quality of anticipation. Not only was I anticipating another entry in the series, the directors and shareholders of the Walt Disney Company were, too. Verbinski and company could no longer fly under the radar, and so we’re left with a film that—like so many other sequels both before and after it—that echo moments that tested well from the original. It’s less a movie one might ever be surprised for, and more of a cinematic interpretation of a marketing report. Had Dead Man’s Chest been the first film, we might have been mildly entertained, but we would have been a very far distance from saying that a film based on a theme park ride has any right to be this good.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven*

Cast: John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund

Have I Seen it Before: Oh yes. This was the last movie I joined Beyond the Cabin in the Woods before they asked me to join the show permanently. It seems like a couple of lifetimes ago. That’s probably because it sort of was…

Did I Like It: In the past I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about this movie. It’s never felt as relentlessly terrifying as Halloween (1978), or as trashy as Friday the 13th (1980), or as insidious unnerving as Hellraiser (1987). Where does it really fit in to the horror pantheon, especially when I would point to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) as the best edition in the franchise.

This time, however I found more to like about it than I had ever before. I must becoming soft in my increasing age. The surreal, almost cubist images in character’s dreams always feel like a more realistic depiction of the ephemeral nature of dreams, far more than what most might find in cinema.

That manages to paper over some of the flaws I still can’t quite get over. The teenagers are relatively well cast, but a bit too earnest for their own good. I also can’t help but laugh a little bit when adolescents in movies are having astonishingly good sex, when anyone over the age of 25 is pretty certain that no adolescent has ever had any good sex since time began.

Ultimately, though, when the characters start talking about the nature of dreams, the film becomes less of a cinematic experience and more a videotaped podcast on the subject of dreams. To be fair, Craven has that problem in his films. New Nightmare had the same problem occasionally, although those instances felt more natural in light of that film’s more mythological undertones.

* I may have said this before, but it bears mentioning again. The man had the best name of a horror director ever. It was like if James Whale had been nicknamed John Spookyfuntime, or if John Carpenter had been name John Relentless-Suspense-And-Never-Being-Bogged-Down-By-Excessive-Backstory.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, sure. If you hadn’t seen it by fall of 2003, you were way behind the times. I even managed to stick around for the sequels, although for the life of me I can’t think of why I might have done this.

Did I like it?: I’ve often been struck by the difficulty to view a movie without measuring it against the context of the anemic sequels it spawned, or how we all feel about the star of the film. Given that this film legitimized the continuing of both long past the point we should have allowed, it’s hard not to reflexively judge the film as a mistake. Had this film tanked or not resonated with an audience, we’d probably not have to brace ourselves for more big budget missteps from Depp, or really have to hear about him at all.

But the film does resonate, though. The idea that a theme park ride could create such a singularly watchable film is further evidence that pretty much no one knows what they’re doing when they go about developing a big budget motion picture. The Lone Ranger (2013) should have been great on spec (and has much of the same creative talent), but wasn’t, and if anyone thought this would make great spectacle before the movie premiered, they would have been deemed a lunatic.

That’s because the movie is only occasionally interested in its source material. A shot here or there is taken from what visitors to Disney parks had seen for decades, but the movie is really about a character perpetually outmatched by the world around him, singularly possessed by a quest to regain the best parts of himself, using only his wits to win the day.

There’s also a love story with Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly (Natalie Portman?)… You know, for the kids.

If only the sequels could have understood what made the first film work. If only Depp could have avoided letting this level of movie stardom go to his head. Maybe we would have gotten another movie approaching the fun displayed here, but, as I indicated above, getting even one film this good was more than we could have hoped for.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, in some weird haze that was 2008, I have a vague recollection of owning it on DVD, but then again I owned lots of stuff back then.

Did I Like It: It’s a difficult topic to approach. Burton’s output since the early 90s has been quite a bit off balance. For every Big Fish (2003) or Big Eyes (2014)* there have been an army of Dark Shadows (2012) and Alice in Wonderland (2010) to deal with. So I will go out on a limb and say that this is Burton’s best film since the turn of the century.

And yet, I don’t think I can say I would like it.

As to why, I think format may be working against Burton. He isn’t alone in making this mistake, but in the transfer from stage musical to musical film, some things get lost. The stage play is one of big booming melodrama, whereas here the proceedings are relegated to a tiny set and tinier frames. The big-budget musicals of yore like The Sound of Music (1965) traded in their bombast (or more appropriately, enhanced it) with a sweeping sense of the cinematic. Even an urban tale like West Side Story (1961) has more of a flourish than the dourness here.

The trappings of a movie hurt the story in more ways. Johnny Depp is (or, at least, was) a movie star, but he is not a singer, and the role of Todd really only has one job. Rickman—here stuck playing the thankless and truncated role of Judge Turpin—would have made a riveting Todd. Even Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head** would have been transfixing here. But alas, neither are leading men at the degree needed to deliver a decent opening weekend. So we are stuck with Depp, smack dab in the middle of his “I don’t need to be an actor, I just need a really interesting wig” phase.

I’m relatively sure that phase is still ongoing, but it’s not like we’re all chomping at the bit to see Depp in pictures anymore.

As I type those paragraphs, it’s become clear that I don’t really like the film at all.

*Note to self, between those two examples and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Burton is to always be trusted with a film that has “big” in the title.

**Head in fact gets nothing more than a cameo. A baffling choice made all the more befuddling by the knowledge that a larger role for the actor must reside somewhere on a cutting room/hard drive.