Excessive to An Extreme, At World's End Is A Grand Pirate Epic Marred By Some Serious Narrative Glut

Rating: 8/10 (3 June 2017)

The third and final installment of Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy, At World's End is a massive sea-faring spectacle. If Dead Man's Chest started the franchise on a slightly darker path, At World's End leaves no doubt that this is a completely different animal than the first Pirates adventure. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a sweeping finale stuffed to bursting with superfluous characters and dozens of interweaving subplots, but it is also packed with energy and humor. Gore Verbinski's massive send off to the trilogy is overblown for sure, but it is satisfying enough in the big categories (action, characters, humor, visuals) to make it a worthy climax to the series.
The story of At World's End revolves around no less than the Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) and the East India Trading Company's plan to eradicate all pirates from the face of the earth with the help of Davy Jones and the crew of the Flying Dutchman. The scope of the story is massive. Unlike the first two movies, Pirates 3 is better described as a war movie than a pirate adventure. Alliances between the East India Trading Company and the Pirate Brethren are in a constant state of flux during this two hour forty-five minute behemoth of a movie. Along the way, Jack Sparrow must be rescued from Davy Jones' Locker, the pirates must unite against the encroaching modern world, and all the characters have to find resolution in their arcs. The story is incredibly ambitious, but its density is so overbearing for the most part that that ambition too often goes misplaced. The primary character stuff is not bad. The problems with the story stem from the fact that there is simply too much exposition, too many MacGuffins, and too much screen time given to needless subplots for the story to really shine. It's not that the script is lazy, it's not. Writers Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot put effort into connecting the dozens of side stories in a natural way. If you do your research and take notes, you can follow the plot, but at some point, the shifting alliances and expositionary curses become overkill. There's a great story in here about the celebration of old-fashioned romance in the face of a cynical modern world, but the extra baggage weighs these themes down dramatically.
Still, with Verbinski and company back, the film once again drips with invigorating zeal. The cast continues to buy into the spirit of the franchise. They're all having fun, and Orlando Bloom, Kiera Knightly, and even Bill Nighy get to do some real acting in their respective love stories. There are no revolutionary performances here, but the sum of all the parts of the cast makes for an earnest likability to the movie as a whole. By this film, Depp's Captain Jack loses a lot of the unpredictable charisma that he brought to the role in the first two movies. His role is mainly comedic in At World's End, that by itself does not make Depp's performance any worse. Depp is a great comedic presence. He's genuinely funny, and if he doesn't get as much of the serious moments as he might have, it really didn't bother me.
At the risk of sounding redundant, the look of this trilogy capper is yet again captivating in its overflow of imagination. Most of the creature designs are carried over from Dead Man's Chest, but the new additions here, including the steamy Singapore sets and Chinese junks, are rich in detail and personality. John Knoll and his team at ILM continue to dazzle with their special effects as well. The action scenes are imagined at a scale so much greater than the swashbuckling swordfights and battles from Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest, and ILM does a superb job bringing them to life. The final conflict, a gigantic battle between the entire cast of characters procured throughout the trilogy in the middle of a biblical whirlpool in the pounding rain, is the perfect stage for the climax of the trilogy. It is a rousing action scene because of Verbinski's complete control over its complexity. Every character has a role in the battle, and there are even character resolutions that happen as the action is happening! Even with an ungainly amount of stuff going on in the scene, Verbinski gives it a fantastic orientation. You can tell what's going on and you can actually follow the battle. The scene is transporting. It puts you there, in the rain, with the characters. By the time it's over, you feel like you need some dry clothes and a nap.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a balls-to-the-wall extravaganza. The Verbinski Trilogy gets bigger with every installment and At World's End represents the series' absolute zenith of "bigness". That is both harmful and helpful to the movie as a whole. The story is completely over-inflated with exposition that drags on forever and an unnecessarily shaky set of alliances (would it be so bad to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the start?). There are flaws in this movie that would doom a hundred similar films. It's Gore Verbinski's direction and his relentless aura of fun that keeps this ship afloat. At World's End has gotten better with subsequent viewing for me. I'd wager it's because every time I see the film, more of the story comes into focus. The first time I saw this movie I was completely lost and unable to connect to the film's big moments. By now, those moments hit harder than ever. Who knows, in a few years I may be singing this movie's praises even more.
77/100