Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

The last film of the trilogy. The company is winning. The East India Company controls the seas, piracy is punished by hanging, and Davy Jones's ship is now under the company's orders. Elizabeth, Will and Barbossa assemble a team. First Jack Sparrow has to be brought back from the land of the dead. From there the film moves toward a meeting. Nine pirate lords will convene and decide whether to fight. In between there is a bath house in Singapore, a sea of ice and a desert of salt. What the narrative is interested in is not piracy but an ending: the film is about the closing of an era and the characters know it. Everyone betrays everyone. In the middle it becomes hard to follow who is working with whom, and that is its most criticised feature. The last section takes place inside a whirlpool. Two ships fight while turning, and there is a wedding in the middle of it. It runs close to three hours and the plot is far from the simplicity of the first film. It was made together with the second film in a single shooting period. The scale of the effects was large for the time; the whirlpool combines real footage shot in tanks with digital backgrounds. Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Chow Yun-fat and Keith Richards are in the cast. Gore Verbinski directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants to finish the trilogy. Who it is not for: anyone looking for simplicity; the narrative is crowded, long and tiring to follow.