journal features

movie review - Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2013.02.25

I have no idea how this mess of a movie got released. It looked interesting enough in the trailers, but by the ten minute mark I felt more like I was being patronized or perhaps insulted than anything. It's a tired, stitched-together pastiche and the actors look like they were going through the motions. Seriously, the star looks like he regrets being there.

And since when are mermaids vampires? Was that always the case? "Luring you to your doom" could indeed include draining your blood, I suppose, but then why pursue notoriously awful-tasting humans when the sea is literally full of fish (at least at the time that this movie was set).

Not recommended. See the first of this series if you haven't already but pass on this one.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)