Still shot from Disney film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is going gangbusters at the box office, as anyone could have predicted. It led in U.S. receipts this past weekend even though its grosses declined by 68 percent from the previous weekend. Even so, it has collected nearly double what the first installment in the series, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, earned in its first ten days. It has snagged less money than the second installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, did during the same period, but the latter opened in July when school was out.

If you haven’t yet seen it, you may be wondering whether it’s actually any good or it’s just that audiences simply want to see how it all turns out.

It’s a little of both, I’d say.

The film has all the surface appeal of its predecessors: gorgeous visuals, amazing action sequences, breakneck pace (most of the time), and interestingly odd characters and situations. As in the first two installments, At World’s End does not shy away away from grim and disturbing subject matter, and as in the first film, good ultimately triumphs over evil.

Also as in the first two films, there are serious disappointments for the main characters in the end. That adds a dose of what simpletons think to be realism, but it does leave us feeling rather deflated as the credits roll. This is a silly fantasy, after all, not a docudrama about the Gulf War.

Very much to the good is the filmmakers’ decision to resist any temptation to tie the story to current events. The closest they get is to beat us over the head with the theme that big government and big business are bad, and that freedom is good. Well, given the penchant of both major U.S. political parties for big government, that’s probably a message we need to hear nowadays. 

All three main characters, however, are far less interesting in this installment. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow is a whole lot less unusual and charming now that we’ve seen him in two long movies already. Depp doesn’t bring anything new to the character, and hence one of the great delights of the first two installments is thoroughly blunted in this one.

The same is true of Will Turner, played by Orlando Bloom, and Elizabeth Swann, played by Keira Knightly, both of whom manage to be even more humdrum than in the previous two outings. Bloom’s Turner shows few if any moments of inspiration, and Knightly tries gamely to bring some life to Elizabeth, but there is really nothing for it. Worse, one sees no chemistry at all between Bloom and Knightly, and little to none between Knightly and Depp. They all seem to be trying so hard just to get through the mayhem that they can’t stop to listen to one another.

A perfect example of this problem is a wedding that takes place in the middle of a battle between two ships in the middle of a maelstrom. It’s funny, clever, and diverting, but it shrinks the human story down to nothing. That is the way of the film, and it is almost certainly unintentional on the filmmakers’ part.

The crazy stuff spinning around the central characters makes the film worth watching, but it would  have been a good deal better if the producers had given them some moments in which to communicate rationally with each other. Then the audience could see how the characters’ minds really work, as they deal with situations with with we’re more familiar. That, in turn, would vastly increase the audience’s identification with the characters, and their emotional involvement with them.

The same fault is evident in both Shrek 3 and Spider-Man 3, released recently and having done well at the box office but not as well as the predecessors in those series. The films show evidence of their makers having tried to avoid the dehumanization problem, but both largely fail at the human stories because, as in Pirates 3, the central characters have lost their uniqueness. We’ve seen them too much, and the filmmakers, in making sure to give the audiences the characters they have come to like, present characters with whom we are too familiar and who are all but incapable of surprising us. Hence, they’re not strong enough characters on which to hang a movie.

In the case of Shrek 3, the central theme—that you have to love yourself in order to love others—is rubbishy psychobabble, but the underlying theme, that accepting responsibilities is the key to adulthood and also one of the great joys in life, is both true and well worth hearing. Similarly salutary themes are present in Spider-Man 3, but as with Shrek 3 and the new Pirates installment, the big hole in the center of the movie makes it all much less enjoyable and fulfilling than it should be.

Classic Hollywood filmmakers knew that even movies full of action need strong central characters with whom audiences can identify, as one can see in countless films from Intolerance through The Adventures of Robin Hood and Rio Bravo on up to the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. Modern-day filmmakers would do well to learn from the great films of the past. People’s minds still work basically the same as they always have, and the ability to bring new ideas to conventional forms is where both the money and the art are to be found.