First of all, I accept the fact that people have their own subjective preferences i.e. biases about everything. I’m cool with that. Others have reasons for liking things that I myself couldn’t stand being on the same plane of reality with, e.g. telenovelas. That’s fine. Kanya-kanyang trip*. But sometimes when you get a peep into the minds of people and realize their reasons for ranting about something, well, that’s when “ridiculous” gets into the picture.
For example, I LOVE Pirates of the Caribbean. I know many do. But I also know that many don’t, and it just sticks to my craw that a movie that I consider one of the benchmarks of its genre would get a “rotten” rating in rottentomatoes.com. Okay, we all have our preferences. But reading into the reviews that gave it a rotten rating clued me in on just how piss-poor some movie reviewers do their jobs. Almost all of those who gave POTC: AWE negative ratings jawed about the so-called confusing plot, centered on the characters doing seemingly aimless decisions that gave the film a pointlessly convoluted story. What? Will Turner allies himself with Sao Feng, and then with Lord Cutler Beckett, and then with Hector Barbossa. What the hell is going on here? Now I’m lost.
I was merely summarizing the rants. I, personally, am not lost. You see, one cardinal rule in understanding the story is understanding the characters and their motives. You can forget I said anything if you only see movies to enjoy action sequences or special effects. That’s fine, I have no beef with you. But people, especially reviewers, who describe a film “a cacophony of contrived and disjointed plot devices” without really paying attention to character motives are no different from programmers estimating the amount of time to fix a bug while having no idea whatsoever how the code looks like. In this case, the motive is actually quite simple: Will wants to rescue his father from Davy Jones. Understanding that is understanding two-thirds of the story already. But no one seemed to have given the time of day to do that one simple thing.
My pet peeve: people shooting their mouths off without knowing what the hell they’re talking about.
*To each his own
