28 Rides Later

Rating: Null/10 (26 May 2007)

The politics of summer movies is strange indeed. Critics seem particularly out of tune of viewers excepting for gross ranking. After the second weekend, word of mouth trumps advertising, so it will be interesting to see how this current crop is rated by IMDb viewers after that. As action movies go, what matters to me first is the cinematic experience. Story, characters and such need only be sufficient to give an excuse for optical adventure. That's why I like Stephen Sommers and Peter Jackson. They understand dimension, and provide it to me in ways that are new and exciting.
"Spiderman" in all three episodes should have been at least as good as the best. Instead, as with all the Marvel productions, it was far less rewarding than average. They are boring if you can't get excited about the characters; I just can't imagine anyone who could. We need a "Doctor Strange" movie. And we need some other filmmakers than have been seen in the Marvel corral.
For that Doctor Strange movie, we could do a lot, lot worse than go with Verbinski. I'm impressed by this movie. It's not of the "King King" class, but it has quite a few interesting elements.
What most people will remark on is the characters, led by Depp. They are good enough excepting the "girl" pirate who is so far below the others in charisma it will set female imagination back a couple decades. It was a mistake made in the original, a soccer snooker that we got stuck with. We needed Geena Davis, or her successor. If Geena was the new Sigourney, who's the new Geena?
The story is very well tuned to my mind. Every major character has some duplicity, not all of which we can guess or even understand after we get the whole movie. I believe they did this to give the movie legs, so that it will be watched over and over again after the opening honeymoon is over. But it has an effect that I appreciate: the narrative is sliced and diced as we jump from story to story and shifting intents. Its by some otherwise crass writers, but in this context doesn't seem overlarge.
What's nice are two cinematic effects.
The first I have remarked on before. The intent of the film is to merge cinema with theme park, a unified monetizing strategy with two different media. That means the film is more extremely architectural and spatial than usual. A reward for those of us who appreciate space. As with the two previous films, each episode on a ship establishes the ship first as a space, and then the characters within. Its rare; its hard; its effective; it empowers imagination and lucid dreaming. And probably sells Disneyland ride tickets as well.
The second cinematic value I appreciated was the variety of styles and effects. Usually a summer blockbuster is pretty much the same noise from beginning to end, with the only variety coming from the different tools used by the effects subcontractors who lead different action scenes. But there was so much design here as we moved from one storyline to another, it made the thing seem as if we were visiting different rooms, each with its own world dynamics. Its most obvious when we first see Sparrow in his limbo, a ship frozen Shackleton- wise in a smooth surface of ice. This, by the way really does quote the amazing Hurley photos of this very real episode in history. Somebody knew their history of cinema and pushed that perceptron button.
That business about crab-stones is inspired. (Oddly the paired effect  when Kalipso is "unleashed"  is the least memorable in the film.) The idea of having Depp encounter versions of himself is extremely clever and I know of no one else who could have pulled it off. Its what he does in his mind when acting anyway. These scenes justify the ticket price.
This isn't the best adventure film, but surely the best of the season, and definitely worth watching.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.