How can this be? This is like a bad dream. A Jerry Bruckheimer film on IMDB:s top 250 list?

Rating: 3/10 (31 August 2003)

The first swordfight can sum up the whole movie. They jump on a board, one guy flies up in the air, he lands on the board again and the other one goes up. And the brain-dead audience laughs, they actually laugh - it's a sin against anyone who considers film an art form.
In the words of Tyler Durden, `Murder, crime, poverty-these thing don't concern me.' And his right, it should not concern us as much as Pirates of the Caribbean. Because crime and poverty is things a fraction of mankind have to deal with daily. Stupidity on the other hand is something that affects everyone living today. What should concern us is that a majority of mankind's new favourite movie is on an intellectual level of Teletubbies.
To actually criticize Pirates of the Caribbean through pointing out the lack of character development, the fact that every character and every scene is a clichÃ© or the all-around dreadfulness of the script, is pointless. No one that can formulate an intelligent answer can deny it.
I would instead like to share with you an epiphany I have had pondering this movie. The question I asked myself was why people have so different experiences watching the same movie? The answer is simply that the child enjoying Teletubbies have a different level of understanding than the adult.
The same answer applies to why some people think movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean and A Knights Tale are `brilliant'. And thinks Citizen Kane and A Clockwork Orange are the worst movies ever made.
This doesn't seem like such a catastrophe, we are all different, we accept that and get along anyway. But it is a catastrophe to quality filmmaking, because money-grubbing filmmakers without a sense for art will use the same pre-build Hollywood-scripts and recycle the same garbage for generations.
Perhaps it's also a catastrophe for human intelligence. Not that a bad movie magically would drain the viewers IQ but it will in another way deprive the viewer from knowledge. Everything is a choice and through seeing a Jerry Bruckheimer flick instead of a Stanley Kubrick film the viewer loses an intellectual experience.
How the loss of quality art would affect the democratic system in the long run, which only chance of working at all is if the average voter has a reasonably high level of understanding, is not that hard to imagine.