Pirates director wants creative madness Comments by Robert Purchese

Considering his Pirates movies went from awesome to awful the words pot and kettle spring to mind....

...but he does have a point though....

Yeah, I'll give this guy's comments a bit more creedence when he apologises for ruining one of the best adventure films of recent times with two shitty sequels.

creative maddness is always a good thing :)

How about instead of telling the developers that creative madness is good, he has a word with the publishers?

I don't know what films you saw, but I absolutely loved all of them myself. But I guess it's a cool thing to do, to hate the POTC films. Must be some sequel-phobia or something.

The film industry never clings to tried and tested business models in search of a guaranteed returns on investments.

And the Pirates sequels were amazingly innovative and not at all cash-ins.

(Oh wait.)

"I don't know what films you saw, but I absolutely loved all of them myself. But I guess it's a cool thing to do, to hate the POTC films. Must be some sequel-phobia or something."

Sequel-phobia? No. It's down to the fact that the second and third films were UTTER SHIT.

And do you have anything more specific to say about the film than "it's shit"?

Didn't this guy remake Ringu?

@ squarejaw - yep, he directed the US version of The Ring, which is probably the only Jap-to-US remake where the western version is better, IMO. I'm not sure if he did the sequel.

@ OnlyMe - there were a number of reasons the Pirates sequels were shit; confusing plot, absurd monsters, over-long, needless scenes and too many double-crosses to name a small number.

99% of the time it's not up the developers, so maybe he should stop blaming designers and developers. He should team up with Steven Spielberg, together they could change this industry forever because nobody else thinks as 'left field' as they do.

So not the director of "Pirates XXX", then? Shame.

PotC II was boring to the extent that I have not bothered with PotC III yet. I really liked the first one - most of all because of Depp's character, of course, and the undead pirate crew - Rush especially - had a depth of personality rarely seen in such films. A great villain.

But iven in the forst film I felt the end dragging on a bit, too much here and there and back again and then once more. Kind of like a delivery mission in a MMORPG. Boring.

The second film was just a string of extravagant action set pieces loosely strung together by an utterly uninteresting plot. What was that film even really about? What were they after? Why did they bother with all that nonsese? I forget. I really can't remember what the movie was about, but there was a squid-faced man and a giant octopus in it. I think they were were related somehow.

Oh, and the fencing scenes, which in the original was a bit like something out of Monkey Island: Swing - Parry - Quip, Swing - Parry - Pun, had devoled to a tedious Swing - Parry - Swing - Parry - Swing - Parry - Swing - Parry - Swing et cetera, indefiately. Some times the swinging and parrying took place in novel settings, like in a an old mill, or, um, on an island I guess, but was it pretty much all the same, and nothing much ever came out of these action sequences.

Boring. Leading nowhere, except to the next action set piece.

Maybe PotC III is better, I don't know, don't really need to see it.

Could be that the suits came in and butchered Verbinskis artistic vision on the sequels, of course, foring him to "mainstream" production or cut corners on the scriptwriting, which did seem rushed. Maybe that's why he's giving aout warnings against their influence now, and urging indepencense and creativity. He's got a good point either way: movies are so expensive to make these days, investors naurally want to hedge their investments, and tha's causing (big) films to be more boring and uninventive; popcorny. Games are definately moving in the same direction; an AAA game coste about the same to make as a minor blockbuster movie now, and involes hundreds of people. Games are definately adopting the Hollywood model of making entertainment, and that is certainly stifling creativity and innovation. And games studios ARE copying eachother a lot. So this is a good time to get a little crazy. I'd rather see more games like Brütal Legend and Rez than even more WWII shooters.

Maybe what we need is proper game testing to do the already existing genres right. We do need innovation, but concentrating on quality instead of quantity would be a great step too.

Tsk, I think they both were excellent fun. It entertained me very much, which were their sole purpose. I do believe a lot of the POTC sequels hate comes from people on a bandwagon. It's one of those "commercial success = crap" things. Still, I can understand that some people actually do dislike the movies.

@OnlyMe

As Trigger says, the plot was all over the place and made very little sense. It was never entirely clear why they were in a particular place at a particular time. It kept switching all the time as though they realised each branch of storyline wasn't actually strong enough to support sticking with it for too long. The dialogue was bad, it was badly acted and directed, Johnny Depp wasn't nearly as funny as in the first one and yet that seems to be all they sold the film on for the second and third films. Not to mention they were way too long and generally didn't recreate the sense of fun and adventure of the first film (which I love).

Basically, shit.

EDIT: I really liked the first one as I say, and I hoped the sequels could take it to bigger and better places. I'm all for sequels, if they're not terrible. Commercial success is not a problem if it's deserved.

@Olemak

Imho, the third one is MUCH better than the second one, if only because the story "evolves" a bit... (I hated the story of PotC2, because it was sooooo boring and nothing happened)

Having all three now on Blu Ray is quite amazing. All three offer amazing quality^^

But Gore Verbinsky... he should look in the mirror before complaining about others. All his characters are "tried and true" and are based on everything but his own damn mind. The only twist in PotC is the Curse in the first part, the rest is just... well not "twisty". I liked those movies, but where's his innovation he speaks of? There's NONE at all! At least I can't see any!

To be fair i think the main problem with the PotC sequels stems from really bad scripts. Visually the films were always impressive, so i think it's unfair to entirely blame him for them getting shitter.

A bit of trivia on IMDB:

"They started filming without a finished script."

I think that pretty much sums it up!

So did the Lord of the Rings movies.

@Feanor:

What all three of them? Or they started filming the first one before the second and third films had finished being scripted (since they were all filmed at the one after the other)?