Pirates of the Carribloggian

Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean is a tale following the now-legendary and most-recognized pirate in the world, Jack Sparrow, on his adventures seeking his ship and rum as well as getting into as much trouble as possible in a two and a half hour film . . . times 5 because there are four movies now and apparently there is a fifth one coming.

I'm not going to write a review for each movie; I'm covering the series as a whole because I'm just not that invested in the series at all.

Personally, I don't understand what all the hype is all about, but it's vastly popular. If I were to guess, a lot of the popularity is due to Jack Sparrow as a character as well as the fact that Johnny Depp plays this role.

I can't deny that Depp does well making Jack a realistic, lovable, amusing character, but I find Sparrow a bit obnoxious and annoying really. There is something magical about him though. I can't put my finger on what it is, but Depp has achieved something miraculous in becoming Sparrow.








Kiera Knightly (Elizabeth Swan) and Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), however, exist only in the shadow of Captain Jack.

Turner seems to be your run-of-the-mill good-guy until he is coerced into being a pirate. Even then, however, he has retained most of his good-guy attitude wanting to save his dad and all, but he does have issues with Sparrow that lead him to do some under-handed things as revenge against Sparrow and to save Swan, making him once again, a good-guy. Bloom does this well, but I feel that this is because in his films, he is a good-guy; anything slightly "Evil" is removed from his character. I don't feel that Bloom could ever be anything less than a good-guy.













Swan on the other hand appears to be weak. Sure she tries to be a pirate, but fails miserably. It is not until the end of At World's End that she has any strength at all when she orders the pirates to fly their colors and fight back against the British. It is hard to tell if this is due to Knightly or the writers, but either way, it's not good. Given that Knightly is respected as a good actress, I am more inclined to blame the writers. Perhaps they were appealing to the idea that women were thought to be incapable of much of anything during the time the movie is set in and Knightly was only doing the best she could. Either way, I wish Elizabeth Swan was a stronger character throughout the entire series instead of just at the end.










I really wished they had stopped with At World's End. Everything was nice and tied up. There was no need to continue the franchise, but this is Disney we're talking about and they will continue making more movies until there is no longer any interest.

On Stranger Tides was okay. It was interesting and shorter than the others. I also think I enjoyed it more than the previous films. It could merely be that I actually cared about the characters -- specifically Philip and
Syrena. They were much more compelling than Will and Elizabeth Turner.

All in all, I don't see anything special about these films. They were okay (thanks mostly to Johnny Depp and his awesomeness), but that's it. I can only hope that the coming stories get better following the latest film installment. Chances are, however, that Disney will ruin it by running it into the ground until they don't have any audience. But one can help.