Warning-- a long, rambling, spoiler-filled entry follows...
Saw the late night early preview Thursday, but haven't had a chance to post 'til now...
I concur with the "Empire Strikes Back" feel to the movie-- it seemed to be mostly about character development and setting up the third movie, down to the "need to go off now and find our friend who sacrificed himself so we could get away" ending...
After one of the Kraken attacks, a fish-man says to Davey Jones "There were (x number of survivors), the sea has claimed the rest", not "the Kraken got 'em", which means to me that folks "eaten" are not necessarily taken as food... even the hat survived a few weeks down the beastie's gullet...
The plot didn't seem convoluted to me, being a straightforward "Find the McGuffin"-- everyone wants the key/ Dead Man's Chest/ what's inside to further their personal agenda...
I felt that many of the "bits" in the movie were played for laughs, like the "circus music" soundtrack behind the swinging cages moment or the "Look--" (BANG!) "Undead Monkey!" bit, but over-all the tone of the movie was darker then the first-- the character development left you wondering who to root for:
Will-- moved from his "black and white" view of the world to accepting the grey areas within himself and others in the first movie, and is solidly in the mode of "our hero", realizing he can be ruthless if he needs to be and break the rules, so long as he knows the goal he is fighting for is a good one... he doesn't develop much in this one, though after the last Black Pearl moment when he sees Elizabeth and Jack in a clutch, he may have to work out accepting that Elizabeth is not exactly who he thought she was...
Jack-- Our protagonist in this movie, his actions drive the plot the way Elizabeth's drove the plot in CotBP. He's become a man without a set goal, now that he has the Pearl, and works as an anti-hero while he determines just who it is he wants to be now-- it isn't until the very end and his "Hero moment" that he goes back to being the "Jack Sparrow" he was in the first movie-- in fact, the whole business with trying to find a new hat can be seen as a symbol of his search; when he regains his hat at the end, he regains his sense of self...
Elizabeth-- loses everything. She's gone far down the path of "betrayers and mutineers" and needs to find some way to recover her sense of self by the end of the movie (I did miss a bit of the final scene in the witch's house at the end, so correct me if I'm wrong about this-- damn "big soda/ too many previews before the film"). Her betrayal of Jack gives him his self-validation though-- even the best of people have a bit of pirate inside...
A minor quibble-- I thought the rationale for Pintel and Ragetti's return was a bit thin, plot-wise-- a minor bit of "Hand-waving" necessary to get the "commentary characters" on the scene... also, the man in the well in Tortuga, though a reference to the ride at Disney World, felt jarring this time, unlike similar references in the last movie...
I also missed Murtog and Mulroy, the two Redcoats from Port Royal, and it doesn't look like they're back in the last movie either-- perhaps they were part of the crew that Norrington lost chasing the Pearl...
From internal cues, the movie is set sometime between 1715 and 1727-- so now that Cutler Beckett has Davey Jones' heart, Britiain is set to "rule the waves" and bring the Golden Age of Piracy to an end, and all the sailors will be "working for the EIC' which they were complaining about at one point during the movie-- the "Empire" is the only force that has accomplished their goals fully at the end of the movie-- the "rebels"/ pirates have been pushed to the edges of the map (comparable to the edge of the galaxy in the final scene of SW:ESB).
I remember reading a while ago that Disney had been sued by members of the Arawak/ Carib tribes over the representation of cannibals in the film, but it's solidly in the literary tradition of the time. The scenes parallel both the depiction of natives in Robinson Crusoe and the movie The Man Who Would Be King. Also the "And so they made me their cheif..." line of Jack's in the first movie...
Other movie/ book references-- Hunt for Red October whenever the Flying Dutchman rose from beneath the waves, Elizabeth's "marionette ghost" parallels a scene in Tim Power's book On Stranger Tides, the crew of the Dutchman recalls Shakespeare's line in The Tempest about "Full fathom five your father lies... and suffers a sea change," and reaching for your sword only to find it gone, referencing the self-referencing done in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom about the scene where Indy shoots the Arab swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark...
With that fairly convoluted sentence, I'll put my inner English Major away... just for the record though, it was a great sequel, and I don't think it hurt the franchise (which I was worried about, seeing how the Matrix thing turned out...). I was also worried that there would be a "cool things for marketing purposes" problem with the fish-men crew, sort of like I felt about the Ewoks in the StarWars movies, but I didn't get that feeling after the movie this time...
(Edit: sigh- this is what I get for revising a long post multiple times before submission.)
