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

In his review of Dead Man’s Chest, Aren notes how the film vacillates frequently between goofy slapstick moments and dour melodrama. In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the tonal contrasts established in the first two films are even greater; for every moment of slapstick, this film doubles down on the dour and the dark. And man is this film ever dark.

Death pervades the film. The film opens with a shot of a noose, a symbol of death and execution, of colonial and racially targeted violence. The East India Company under the command of Tom Hollander’s Cutler Beckett has called for the execution of anyone associated with piracy, and in the wild world of this fantastical Caribbean, that means an awful lot of people. Dozens of prisoners are led up to the gallows in the opening scenes, habeus corpus has been revoked in the effort to ferret out the pirates. Lacking any recourse, the prisoner’s sing the pirate song, written for the film, “Hoist the Colours,” a dirge sung as one last act of defiance, but also a call across the seas for the far flung pirate lords of the Seven Seas to convene the mythical Brethren’s Court to forge an alliance in defense of freedom. At World’s End deepens and emphasizes the correspondence between freedom and piracy that the previous films began, while also showing the cost of that freedom as well.

Just as we think it couldn’t get any darker, a young boy is led to the gallows. Although he is too short to reach the noose, the hangman provides him a stool and the lever is pulled, a pirate coin falls to the ground and the film’s title appears against a misty white backdrop. It’s a bracing opening for a film that’s pitched as an all-ages blockbuster, almost too much but also setting the stakes of the film as high as possible. Perhaps they’re stakes the film couldn’t quite live up to, but my oh my does it ever try. I cannot help but admire the dedication of the filmmakers to the story and world they’ve spun, even as it spins out larger than even the climactic maelstrom can contain.

In some ways, At World’s End is even more emblematic of the period of filmmaking in which it was created than the previous films in the series, for good and bad. It’s become something of a theme in our film criticism that, often, when we revisit the films of the first decade of the millennium, we discover that things which at the time seemed too much end up looking sweeter in hindsight, even as they presage many of the cinematic trends that would follow in their wake. At World’s End came out in the same May as two other sequels of popular franchises: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 and Dreamworks’ Shrek 3. But Pirates, in box office returns and in its sheer size, was the biggest. While it is often lumped in with those aforementioned films, none of which were particularly well-received, it has more than a touch of Peter Jackson’s influence: Anton noted the influence of The Lord of the Rings on the first Pirates film, but At World’s End is definitely taking a few cues from Jackson’s lengthy and epic King Kong from two years previous.

Like Jackson’s King Kong, At World’s End is committed to its world building and immersion in a particular fantastical view of the past. This is perhaps best shown in the sequence that follows immediately after the film’s pre-title opening. The film cuts to the Asian port city of Singapore, or at least a fever dream of the far-flung British territorial outpost. In At World’s End, Singapore is a city of waterways and lanterns, of mysterious opium dens and exotic creatures and people, even as the film never lets us forget that the British East India Company is in charge.

Picking up shortly after the end of Dead Man’s Chest, we meet up with Kiera Knightley’s Elizabeth Swan and Geoffrey Rush’s Hector Barbossa, as well as Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl, attempting to find a way to rescue Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones’ Locker. To do so, they must meet up with the pirate lord, Sao Feng, played by Hong Kong legend Chow Yun Fat, who has the navigational charts to the locker. It is revealed that Jack himself is Pirate Lord of the Caribbean, and so his vote is needed at the Brethren Court, if they are to deal with Beckett and Davy Jones.

This film, much like the previous entry, continually piles narrative revelation upon revelation, sometimes seemingly haphazardly, and yet the character's motivations remain fairly steadfast in spite of it. It’s a miracle that the audience can follow what’s going on at all, though by the end of the film understanding is strained to breaking.

The film once again mixes slapstick with seriousness as the heroes gain entry to Sao Feng’s fortress. Knightley does well with the slapstick elements, playing with the common trope where the characters must remove weapon after weapon before entering Sao Feng’s lair by having a truly absurd number of guns on her person (and where exactly was she stashing that blunderbuss?). Additionally, there is the thinly veiled threat of sexual violence against a woman trespassing in such a place, though it leads to a joke where the duo of Pintel and Regatti (Lee Ahrenberg and Mackenzie Crook), hiding under the floor boards in support of the main heroes, peek up Elizabeth’s dress, only for her to move and them to spy the nether regions of one of Sao Feng’s goons when trying for a second peek. It’s a genuinely funny moment, but pushes the limits of family friendly Disney fun. But At World’s End will continually push limits: its title is accurate.

Chow Yun Fat’s Sao Feng is a great addition to the series. Decked out in a costume straight out of “Yellow Peril” Fu Manchu stories, Sao Feng nonetheless has a weight and dignity to his character that Chow conveys in his unique and scene-stealing performance. He is not to be taken lightly. As Barbossa explains, he is “Much like myself, but absent my merciful nature and sense of fair play.” It turns out that Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) has already tried to reach Sao Feng and been captured, but Elizabeth and Barbossa secure his return as well as the maps, not realizing that Will has made his own deal with Sao Feng in exchange for Jack, wishing to free his father Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) from Davy Jones’ servitude.

After escaping amidst a battle with the East India Company men in Singapore in the film’s first big fight scene, the crew sails on one of Sao Feng’s ships in search of Jack, through arctic seas and right up to the edge of the world—envisioned, as one might expect, as a massive waterfall right off the end of the map! It is in this kind of imaginary world-building that these films succeed so well, with the production design and special effects marrying perfectly a sense of wonder and heightened reality. While everyone is terrified, Barbossa steers the ship right over the edge of the world, into the black, as the film fades out and we hear “Dead men tell no tales,” a recording from the original Disney ride over a black screen as the sequence transitions.

At World’s End, more than any of the other films in the trilogy embraces wild myths and incorporates them into its open-ended storytelling. Whether it's dabbling in dated pirate tropes, or combining elements of seafaring lore, the Pirates films embrace a freedom in their narratives few other films of this kind of adventure fantasy do. It’s like director Gore Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio are truly embodying the pirate motto of freedom and giving no quarter.

This contributes to At World’s End’s dreamlike logic, which mixes up myths and stories and imagery from over a hundred of years of pirate tales, but imbued with a hyperreal logic it shares with other films from the early aughts, such as the Matrix sequels. It believes that if you can imagine it, you can put it on screen and make people believe.

The sequences following after they sail off the edge of the world into Davy Jones’ Locker exemplify this sense of freedom and daring in storytelling. Here the filmmakers put together a sequence of nearly unmatched surrealism and Looney Tunes logic as seen in a big budget tentpole. The viewer witnesses Jack Sparrow, in a kind of purgatorial state of being, on the Black Pearl surrounded by various variations on himself. We get the imagery of a ship sailing on sand, carried by crabs that emerge from rocks. It’s bizarre, but it works. Once the crew of the Pearl meet up with Jack, and convince him that they are indeed real and that they’ve come to get him out of the locker and return him to the land of the living, the film begins to propel itself to its massive climax, setting the stages along the way. It’s notable here that the Black Pearl is also in the locker with Jack following its being dragged to the depths by the Kraken in the previous film, and can also return with Jack to the land of the living. Even ships, it seems, have a kind of soul to them in this mythology.

On their way out of the locker, the Pearl encounters boats of the souls of the dead, those who should have been ferried to the other side by Davy Jones, before he was under Beckett’s control. Among them is Elizabeth’s father, Governor Swann (Jonathan Pryce), who was betrayed and now joins her mother in the afterlife. This gives Elizabeth further motivation and clears the deck for a more straightforward pirate versus colonial power battle in the end.

After an inventive scene where they must flip the Pearl back upside down to the other side of the ocean as they sail into a sunset, they once again encounter Sao Feng, who ambushes the crew. He captures Elizabeth, and tells her the legend of the goddess Calypso who was in love with a man, the human Davy Jones, but who was bound in human form and betrayed by her lover, who was cursed to sail the seas at the helm of the Flying Dutchman. Sao Feng is then fatally injured in an attack by Davy Jones and the Dutchman, but before he perishes, he makes Elizabeth captain of his ship and bearer of his mantle as a pirate lord.

Thus, the crew convenes the Brethren Court with both Elizabeth and Jack at the table. Here we meet all of the pirate lords from the various countries. The rules of the pirate gathering are often obscure, but they are presided over by the Keeper of the Code, Captain Teague, Jack’s father, played by Keith Richards himself, who was often cited by Johnny Depp as a key influence on his own performance. Decked out in bandanna and accompanied by the famous dog with the key from the Disneyland ride, Keith Richards’ Captain Teague outlines the rules, while Barbossa begs the court to release Calypso from her human bonds and Elizabeth calls for the pirates banding together to defeat Beckett. Teague insists only a Pirate King, elected by the court, can call for war against Beckett, but pirates, in their quest for freedom, always vote for themselves. But it is Jack who breaks the stalemate, electing Elizabeth as King, and paving the way for the final showdown with Beckett’s fleet and Davy Jones.

It’s become a convoluted and widening gyre of a narrative at this point, but not without still further surprises during the final battle, which runs nearly an hour of screen time. Frankly, even though I admire this film a great deal more than most, it is at this point that it tests my own patience. There are so many betrayals, and back and forth parlays, and hidden identities revealed—it is Tia Dalma herself who was Calypso, and betrayed by him. She summons a massive whirlpool, refusing to help any of them and leaving.

While the final giant battle is fitfully entertaining, it lacks the clarity of movement and purpose that Aren noted in Dead Man’s Chest and its wheel fight. People are swinging on masts, leaping between ships, all the while circling a whirling maelstrom. The maelstrom itself is almost a kind of symbol of the series narrative momentum at this point, threatening the very stability and structural integrity of the narrative, but at the same time keeping everything going.

Freedom and the question of bonds, of law, of love, and of duty pervade. If freedom is paramount, then where do those bonds that are valuable come into play? Eventually the film finds an uneasy conclusion, with Will and Elizabeth married in a mid-battle shipboard wedding by Barbossa, but also with Will taking Jones’ place in order to spare him a mortal wound at the battle's conclusion. His servitude as captain of the Dutchman will see him serving the role Jones’ should have, ferrying souls to the other side, but at the cost of stepping ashore to see his wife only once every 10 years.

Like Barbossa in the first film, but even more so, Davy Jones is ultimately a tragic figure. Betrayed and betraying, his quest to navigate love and freedom turns him into a monster to all. In one of the most touching sequences in the film, we get to see him in his human form, as he and Calypso meet one last time.

It’s a dark film, dealing with weighty subject matter in a way that few films of its kind do. It deals with fantastical elements, but grants the fantastic as much seriousness as it can. It’s a cliche statement at this point, but they really don’t make films like this anymore—films that indulge the imagination while remaining solid works of craftsmanship in so many ways, from the intricate sets and costumes, to the computer effects and character designs. Perhaps the imagination and whimsy only works because of the solid craftsmanship it rests upon?

Still, it’s hard not to see, as with Dead Man’s Chest, but perhaps even more so, the ways that filmmakers took many of the wrong lessons from At World’s End. Rather than a dreamlike and playful introduction of complexity and creativity, most blockbusters today are content with mining our pre-existing attachments for emotional weight. Additionally, the idea is that big budgets must mean big run times, not necessarily big investment in visuals or texture. Obviously there are exceptions (the blockbusters of Christopher Nolan or James Cameron come immediately to mind), but still, At World’s End might have been the film that established  the mold for Hollywood and CGI bloat overwhelming everything else. The very next year Iron Man would be released, and audiences began to take for granted that everything we could imagine could be put on screen. The Pirates of the Caribbean films remembered that you still had to imagine something.

8 out of 10

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (USA, 2007)

Directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, based on characters created by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert, based on Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean; starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Kevin R. McNally, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Naomie Harris, Tom Hollander, Chow Yun Fat.

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