Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

Score: 3 / 5

I loved this movie. I love pirates, I love Geoffrey Rush, I love the swashbuckling action and high-seas fantasy. It's become cool to hate the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for reasons I cannot comprehend; it remains one of my favorite series of any media. Yet for all my enthusiasm and affection for this movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a bloated, waterlogged disappointment.

It's safe, in this instance, to squarely blame the script. We can only bitterly wonder what was in Jeff Nathanson's mind as he wrote this mess of a tale. The brilliance of Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal is nowhere to be found here. Instead we get a haphazard tale that takes intriguing ideas and enchanting mythology and butchers them into a collage of weirdness that is left unexplained and, worse, underappreciated. The basic premise of the film makes almost no sense as timelines are made arbitrary and characters don't age as they should. And, perhaps worst of all, the dialogue is laughably banal, using frequent and lazy sexual innuendo to offset the occasional expository hooey that feels like an elementary book's back-cover summary. Even casual interactions between characters reveal nothing beyond the comparable shallowness of each. One can only hope that Nathanson's upcoming work on The Lion King remake can see him return to some sort of form.

Have I lambasted it enough yet? Perhaps not, as I consider the direction under Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg. The relative unknowns have their moments of style and flair, notably in one scene when Jack Sparrow faces the guillotine leaves you feeling particularly elated. But their slipshod sense of characters, incoherent pacing, and bizarre tendency to randomly break into slow motion are bewildering more often than not. They want to tie in too many threads, keep the focus on too many people doing too many things, and answer questions that were never asked.

**SPOILER ALERT**

The film takes place almost twenty years after At World's End, making Henry Turner about 19 years old. Having searched his entire young life for a way to save his father from his cursed fate aboard the Flying Dutchman, he embarks on a quest to find the Trident of Poseidon, which can apparently control the sea and break marine curses. He teams up with young astronomer and scientist Carina, an orphaned girl wrongfully accused of witchcraft, before the two join Captain Jack Sparrow's escape from the law to the open ocean. Concurrent with all this, Captain Salazar and his ghostly crew of pirate-killers escape from the Bermuda Triangle hell-bent on finding and murdering Jack, the pirate who entrapped them there.

While trying to acclimate myself to this new adventure and its new faces, I found myself annoyed that there was no mention of Angelica the lovely pirate whom Jack left on a cay with a voodoo doll of himself. We still don't know what became of Syrena the mermaid or Philip the missionary. We do, thankfully, see a wealthy and powerful Barbossa as captain of the Queen Anne's Revenge and his restoration of the Black Pearl from Blackbeard's bottle. And, of course, we get a couple brief scenes featuring Will and Elizabeth Turner, though their presence is woefully short-lived.

With the exception of some spectacular ghost soldiers (essentially pirates, but not by name), an island of stars, and the show-stopping but sadly brief presence of predatory ghost sharks (GHOST. SHARKS.), the film has little in the way of novelty or awe. I'm glad something in this series finally mentioned the Bermuda Triangle, and it's pretty cool, but the mythology is underwritten and confused, linking it to Jack's compass in a nonsensical manner. Worse, and unforgivably in my opinion, the climax comes with the revelation that Carina the astronomer is actually Barbossa's long-lost daughter, not long before he dies to save everyone from Salazar. Why the film felt the need to kill off the best character and actor in the franchise is far beyond me. While he's already been brought back from the dead once and presumably could again, the witch-goddess Tia Dalma is long out of the picture. This film tries to re-do her in the form of Shansa, another tattooed witch persecuted by a naval officer (in the form of David Wenham, no less), but she's in it so sparsely I wonder if she wasn't just a fever dream.

The film ends rather firmly, thank heaven, and even eked out a little tear from me in the last scene. But stick around after the credits: we see Will Turner, free of the Dutchman and sleeping with a radiant Keira Knightley in her second scene in the movie, having nightmares of his curse. The shadow of Davy Jones falls across his bed and we see a crab claw snap before he awakens, horrified. As he falls asleep again, safe in the arms of his love, the camera pans down to see wet barnacles on the ground, suggesting his nightmare wasn't only in his head. Should Disney dive in for another swashbuckling adventure, could they resurrect Bill Nighy as the devilish fish-man? I certainly hope not, but the possibilities of Will's post-traumatic stress from the curse are at least intriguing.

This franchise, which could go on forever considering the endless ideas of mythic adventures in the Caribbean, will probably not see another installment. If it does, as I dearly pray it will, Disney desperately needs to double- and triple-check who it hires to write and direct. This bunch of flotsam and jetsam should have had to walk the plank.

IMDb: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

The Book Thief (2013)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I finally saw this war drama, which I don't think had a wide theatrical release, and fell madly in love. It's not what I expected, and it's not really an original landmark, but it's really, truly lovely. Especially notable is John Williams's score, which skillfully heightens the drama without drawing much attention to itself (a feat John Williams has not been able to do in his frequent Spielberg collaborations).

We follow young Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), adopted into a German family as the Nazis rise to power. Over the course of four years, she learns fear, bravery, and love through her experiences, and, perhaps most importantly, she learns to read. Taught by her foster father (Geoffrey Rush), she actively learns to read and write on her basement walls before creatively spinning tales of her own to comfort the shaken community during air raids. Though integrated into the Hitler Youth, Liesel remains curious and open-minded: She deliberately reads books after seeing the Nazis burn them, and she quickly befriends and protects Max, a Jewish refugee hiding in her home.

I have several reasons for liking this film, and most of them are purely reactionary. By that, I mean I don't have a lot of high-brow Thoughts about The Book Thief, because it is almost shockingly simple and sweet in its delivery. It seems to have no grand delusions of its own importance (which makes it profoundly important, I might add), and indeed it often feels like a child's fantasy. Gentle and even whimsical, the film runs to a slow pace and a palpable heartbeat. That's not to say it is trivial or unsentimental; it is certainly weighted with its thematic content and the contexts of racial, gendered, political, social, and intellectual oppression of Nazi Germany. One of the main discussion points for me is the voice-over narrator (Roger Allam), who represents Death. This is a fantastic concept, a relatively original cinematic device, and a complicated rhetorical move in an otherwise optimistic film, all wrapped up into one.

Though danger and death threaten our protagonists at every turn, nothing seems to quench Liesel's hope, which sometimes makes this film feel a bit like a re-imagining of Anne Frank's famous narrative. Indeed, Liesel's ultimate penning of a diary makes the film more of a comedy in the traditional sense of the word (in which the plot is generally hopeful, or "upward", rather than "downward", as in a tragedy). The greatest warmth and charm of the film are provided by Geoffrey Rush in his typical brilliance, though his character's wife (played perfectly by Emily Watson) brings her own big-hearted presence to the tale.

Director Roger Allam, though, deserves the most credit for this venture. His undeterred efforts to make the film hopeful and warm pay off magnificently in just about every scene. He smartly shows us an awful possibility -- hints at the worst of what we could imagine -- and then allows his characters to persevere, which makes the results of each scene almost as shocking as the horrors we might otherwise expect, but in a positive way. Make no mistake, this is a wartime drama. But there is very little violence, no battle sequence, and even the deaths of main characters (I'm really not spoiling anything, I promise) aren't really devastating. All in all, The Book Thief is one of the most unpredictable dramas I've ever seen, and its sentimental heart never succumbs to melodrama. It's just beautiful.

IMDb: The Book Thief