Pirates of the Caribbean came out in widespread release today, so I’m not going to post any spoilers… well, one, but it’s for your own good.  DON’T LEAVE before the end of the movie.  In our particular theater (jam packed) only 12 were left for the final two minutes of the movie (after the credits).  Yep, another movie that puts the credits on before the Epilogue.

 Now that I’m done spoiling the movie (or rather, saving you from feeling cheated when you’ve seen it but walked out when the credits rolled), we can get to what makes the movie a Geeky Movie…  but we have two major tacks.  We can talk about the huge number and scope of the CGI effects (I’m pretty sure, after watching it, that this is the single most CGI heavy live action film ever made, regardless of Tobey Maguire’s refusual to ever wear the Spidey mask in the Spiderman movies, causing every scene where he’s wearing it, putting it on, or pulling it off to be totally CGI done), or we can go MST3000 on it (Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000 to those not in the know).

 I’m going MST3000, not because of the merits of the CGI, but simply because there are so many GOOFS and oddities in the CGI.  Like in the very first scene (no spoiler here) where the young boy is singing… couldn’t they have used some of the fancy CGI budget to remove the BRACES from his teeth?  Or the believability of a scene (again, no spoiler) where Captain Jack Sparrow meets the Kraken again.  It was a beautiful picture, until they rotated the camera angle and it became apparent that the CGI effects were only truly fleshed in two dimensions, not the three the shot needed.  The crowning scene, the fight used in every trailer for the movie, is a battle between The Flying Dutchman and The Black Pearl in a swirling whirlpool, in poor lighting and torrential rain.  While the effects where obviously better than my computer’s graphic card can put out, I could easily see it being pumped out by an SLIed pair of NVidia Geforce 8800 GTXs on a high end machine.  Or maybe not; it would probably not keep up a good enough framerate because of some of the smaller detailing (flying monkeys, sharkmen, and turncoat RedBlue Coats intent on making the world safe for the East India Company).  But that SLI rig would keep it close!

 But like all truly escapist movies, you have to chose: suspend disbelief, and enjoy, or nitpick.  All in all, it’s still a good ride of a movie.