Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides is a movie that had more impostors than At World’s End had betrayal. Everyone wants to be Jack Sparrow. No one wants to be Will or Elizabeth, including Will and Elizabeth. This simple fact was the kick in the right direction that places On Stranger Tides alongside the stronger of the Pirates franchise films.
We realize that we’re closing in on two months since the movie came out but trust us, this review was lovingly crafted and is well worth the read. Also our local cineplex still has On Stranger Tides showing so quit your complaining. Join Brian and James on their critical review of Pirates of The Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides. We may be a little off in our timing but the time taken is reflected in quality. Y’all know this to be true. Enjoy
James: On Stranger Tides starts us on familiar tides. The city of London. With a hanging of pirates. Or so we can all hope for.
Brian: As usual, Pirates does a lovely job with its crowds and bloodthirsty mobs. Even though the London streets teem with “respectable” citizens and finely-dressed children, the similarities between their behavior and that of a ship full of scallywags is humorously similar.
I’d like to get started right away by saying that I’m very interested in the Blackbeard character. Though the series constructs its pirates using bits and pieces from history (Barbossa is loosely based on Henry Morgan, Jack takes some elements from Calico Jack Rackham, and so on), this is the first time it directly lifted a (mortal) pirate personality from history (not without embellishment, of course).
J: In my mind there are two main questions about Blackbeard. There is the initial question of whether or not he was a good addition to the Pirates cast of characters. There is also the secondary question of whether or not he was wasted by being killed off after only one film.
B: I would answer yes to both of those questions. If you are going to have a franchise titled “Pirates of the Caribbean,” you’re tacitly promising your viewers (is this the correct term for movie-goers?) that someday, they will have a beard-burning, fire-ship driving, treasure-fleet-plundering pirate of the truly mythical proportions to which Blackbeard has risen. Before Johnny Depp started trying on dreadlocks and even before a little underground boat ride was built in Orlando, Blackbeard was a legend. But it is my opinion that On Stranger Tides failed to treat him thus.
I agree. To the second question though, I disagree slightly. I feel like Blackbeard was wasted as a character not because he was killed off so quickly, but because he was developed as a highly magical character. In a franchise so loose from reality in terms of magic and the like, I saw a character like Blackbeard, who was so mythological even in the real world, I thought that making him actually magic rather cheated him a little. I really would have liked to see a Blackbeard who was a straight pirate, fighting for his position of top pirate in a world filled with shamans, undead, and deathly octopus men.
Exactly. Blackbeard was impressive because of his behavior when he first appeared- all he has to do is walk through a doorway to cow his crew, no magic involved whatsoever (“I find myself... in a bewilderment.”). The voodoo I have no real problem with (insofar as pirates have a religion, it is generally identified as Voodooism or Vodoun ), but the character is less meaningful for the pervasive magic in which Disney wrapped him. He’s at least as magical as Tia Dalma, who, you might recall, turned into crabs and became the weather in At World’s End, after resurrecting a twice-dead Barbossa in Dead Man’s Chest and chaperoning an adventure to the afterlife.
I think looking back on the series that perhaps we can hope that this is not the last we will see of Blackbeard. Hopefully he’ll be back, without his magic, and pirating again.
Perhaps. There’s plenty of precedent in the franchise for temporary death. What there is very little, if any, precedent for is actual piracy. Aside from Barbossa’s sack of Port Royale in Curse of Black Pearl, Disney fastidiously avoids any actual piratical acts (probably because they’re all pretty filthy, immoral, violent, graphic, and completely inappropriate for their audience and canon).
Which only stressed more why I was looking forward to a Blackbeard, who might have been out doing some real pirating, while all of the others were out and about not doing the nitty gritty pirating.
Maybe the monkey will reinvigorate that aspect of the world.
We can’t possibly fully explore the addition to the series that Blackbeard represents without addressing the other new addition: his daughter.
Don’t you mean his “daughter?” I adored Angelica the first time I saw the film, and not just because she’s Penelope Cruz. The character hearkens back to the Jack Sparrow of Curse of the Black Pearl, when no one knew whose side he was on, whether he was a “good guy,” and whether anything he said was true or false. For me, On Stranger Tides didn’t point us to one particular “truth” for Angelica, except that she is a master con artist. Even when she attempts to sacrifice her life for Blackbeard, she could easily have anticipated Jack’s maneuver with the chalices, or even, as Jack suspects midway through the film, “fallen for her own con.”
I liked the character as well. While Elizabeth, the former token female character, certainly made a play to become a powerful, non-objectified, female character she really fell short since she was so motivated by her love interests with almost all of the main characters. Angelica on the other hand is motivated by a lot of things, the least of which is her feelings for Jack. Her feelings do tend to sway more to hatred for him then love never-the-less.
If Blackbeard’s future with the franchise is dubious at best, I think it’s safe to say that we haven’t seen the last of Angelica.
This is especially true due to her Spanish heritage. On the open seas where the pirates rule something like nationality isn’t too much of an issue. But now that we’ve seen the Spanish solidly enter the game alongside the English we will have to start thinking about nationality of the characters. She adds a character, on the pirate side of the playing field, who is not English like all of the others. I don’t think the couple Asian pirates that we’ve seen really count, since I’ve tried to forget as much of the third movie that I can.
And the multicultural crew of Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge was so blatantly globally representative, it hardly counts.
So much of the tension between nations that allowed piracy to exist so extensively in the historical Caribbean was a result of the national hatred. It is nice to see the series finally getting into that.
Before this turns into a brilliant, reflective, but ultimately off-topic rumination on the Golden Age of Piracy, allow me to divert us to a character who can be loosely discussed in the same paragraph, or at least on the same page, as Angelica: the priest whose name everyone always forgets (Philip). If Penelope Cruz replaces Kiera Knightley as our token power-chick, then Sam Claflin replaces Orlando Bloom as our token moral compass.
I was unclear, was he really a priest, or simply a highly religious character? Furthermore was he Catholic or Church of England?
The characters, especially Blackbeard, often referred to him as ‘priest’ or ‘cleric,’ and I think at one point (during the exposition of his capture) it’s indicated that he’s a missionary. As for his denomination, I believe it’s Church of England, but I suppose in a world of Jesus and Not-Jesus, it’s a technicality.
I think the Spanish Inquisition might disagree with you.
No one expects it. He’s about as useful as Orlando Bloom, if perhaps slightly less annoying. Also, as far as I’m concerned, Sam Claflin is a no-name actor, which allows us to more easily accept him as a fairly attractive piece of eye candy (for those of the persuasion), and a relatively easily ignored piece of narrative furniture (for everyone else).
I think his first appearance in the film really stresses this. He’s just part of Blackbeard’s mast.
Speaking of Blackbeard’s mast, I simultaneously love and hate the role played by the infamous vessel Queen Anne’s Revenge. I love it because it, like Blackbeard, is one of the great pirate ships in history and myth, and the film absolutely treats it thus. QAR gets a much more reverent treatment than Blackbeard, who is paranoid and mentally fragmented from the prophecies of his zombies from the get-go (“THE ONE LEGGED MAAAAAN!”). The ship is huge, it’s dark; it’s barely controlled chaos. It represents Blackbeard’s reputation better than Blackbeard. It (literally) dwarfs the Black Pearl, which was previously held up as the most fearsome mortal ship on the sea. And, perhaps most interestingly, it is left in the hands of my favorite pirate, Hector Barbossa.
All said I did really enjoy PoTC 4. It marked a series return to a lot of what made the first movie great. It certainly had its pitfalls. If this makes any sense, it had good issues. They were the issues of a series being rejuvenated and not the issues of a series dying. I don’t know if they plan to make any further PoTC movies but they have certainly separated the wheat from the chaff. Stranger Tides is a movie that fans of the franchise will not be embarrassed to place on their shelves alongside the previous films. I know I might even push it up next to the first movie while accidentally knocking at least one of the other two completely off the shelf.
Given my immense bias towards the Pirates films, there was never a question of whether my review would be favorable. The question was: Will I be enthusiastically trumpeting its successes, or will I be savagely defending its wounded honor? For the most part, it has been the former. By my own admission, the movie has its faults, both in and out of the context of the other three, but as James said, those issues are simply indicative of the g-forces generated by turning the franchise in a new, brighter direction. It may not be the strongest entry in the series (which most people agree is Curse of the Black Pearl), but neither will it be the last we hear from the Pirates of the Caribbean.
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