Pirates: On Stranger(er) Tides

[Archbio]

Originally Posted by synk

However it was easy to enjoy it more than the third movie, but I am not sure if that's a road worth going down in this thread.

Well, as a point of comparison, a pirate movie centered around a big naval battle in which there's no big naval battle is probably not very useful, being so low on any scale.

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Originally Posted by SMPB

I'm going to be nice and just give you clue-an article written in 1977 before a good deal of arab primary sources were published/made available is pretty much worthless on this topic as is an article dealing with mostly European accounts which were pretty much all made up and hearsay. According to those accounts Muslim armies were populated by wizards and I'm reasonably sure that is not the case.

Yes, I'm sure that John Haldon, professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University wrote articles taking European sources about Byzantine History at face value to the point that he could have reported ludicrous things such as wizards as facts. Because is was 1977, and there were Giants in those days.

The other section of Wikipedia I've cited (the one that says that Muslim navies eventually adapted to the weapon, implying it took some time and creditting it with some effectiveness,) on the other hand, is pulled from a different work: Pryor, John H.; Jeffreys, Elizabeth M. (2006), The Age of the ??????: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500–1204, Brill Academic.

Here's an article from 1992, Secrecy, Technology and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204, that also appears to credit naval siege breaking effect to Greek Fire, same as the other article.

Now, I'm sure that there's some primary sources that were made available for the first time about Byzantine/Muslim wars between 1992 and now. So I'm just going to say that I'm not going to take your word for it that among those there happens to be material that establishes "Greek Fire was a pathetic weapon" as incontrovertible fact, contradicting every bit of work expressing a different view before that.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

It's more that you do this everytime, you come into something you know nothing about and I have to go dig up all my references from undergrad days and it takes fucking forever and you you do it in evrey single topic I post in and you never read my responses, you never read my sources, you always strawman my arguments and this time I can't be fucked. But yes, we have a lot more sources since the 70s, including ones which show that Muslims had their own forms of Greek fire but they decided to not to use it because they didn't find it effective enough to be worth the effort.
We have sources showing that Greek fire was only used in a handful of battles across a 1000 year period because as I stated it could only be used in highly specified conditions.
We didn't have all these sources in the 70s. No way he can make accurate conclusions. It doesn't matter who the person is, the information is simply not there.
That later quotation doesn't contradict what I said. Again you are strawmanning my argument. Yes of course Muslim navies adapted to Greek fire- read my first post- I said greek fire was incredibly effective when they didn't know it was coming. I said the first few times it was used it basically wiped out the Muslim navy. But pretty much all later accounts of it only refer to these few battles because after that the Muslim navies knew how to counter it and once you knew that it wasn't that dangerous. It wasn't like a cannon, even if you know how cannons work on a ship its hard to shut them down. Greek fire you attack at theright angles, you attack on stormy days, you make your ship fire-repellant it is worthless.

This is all I have to say on the topic.

[Marc v4.0]

Why didn't they just use lasers like civilized savages

[Archbio]

Laser is a really pathetic weapon. After you save the planet a couple of times with it, they just invent Holtzman generators, while not giving a shit. Not to mention sandworms.

Edit: That's a sarcastic metaphor for the "Greek Fire was a pathetic weapon" thing, obviously. My thinking is that secret weapons don't count as pathetic if they save the capital city of your empire more than once, and that over the span of several generations. Which is something both the 1977 and 1992 sources I've provided agree on.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The problem with lasers is more that the most powerful ones are invisible. Hard to aim.

[Lumenskir]

I feel like the people who make these movies never understood at all why the first one was so good, which is amazing because it's not really difficult to understand at all.

It's the Matrix effect. You give someone two automatic sequels to a hit and they start to believe that the first one was something more special than it actually was, and then they feel like the sequels have to continually top it while building up the 'mythos' no matter how retarded it gets.

The worst part is that the more you openly insult your audience with your ridiculously convoluted for its own sake plot, the more they'll bunker down and defend it as something worthy of respect. (See, e.g., Anybody who quotes these words and attempts to 'explain' how Pirates 2 + 3 make any sort of sense/had actual stories).

[Ryanderman]

I enjoyed Pirates 2 & 3, and expect I'll enjoy this one. Sure the plots were overly convoluted for no good reason, but I was able to follow them fine (except what, exactly, Calypso was trying to accomplish there, and the point of her at all. That will forever defy all logic and rationalization)

I think though, the majority of my fondness for these movies comes from the grin I wear on my face all through them, due to Hans Zimmer's sound track.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The problem with the pirates sequels is that they overdid Jack (not that I particularly liked him in the first movie but I can see how he is the draw). He worked in the first one because he wasn't the main star, he could just do what the shit he wanted and it didn't really matter. But when you make the zany charaacter more and more prominent it means either they have to calm down a bit to do plot necessaryt hings or your plot goes all over the place.
As I understand it he is even more prominent in this which could cause more problems.

[Archbio]

Originally Posted by Lumenskir

It's the Matrix effect.

Do the Pirate sequels actually contradict the basic premise of the original in order to function, though? What afflicts them actually seems like a much more benign sequel syndrome: they're just a poor imitation of the first one.

Or are am I missing something about them?

[Fifthfiend]

I think you can reasonably use the same name even if the sequels weren't quite the same kind of bad.

Like a movie with two totally fantastic sequels could be referred to via the "Back to the Future Effect" even if they didn't involve, say... Christopher Lloyd.

edit: whatever the fuck that scene was with Jack and the boat full of crabs in the third one, was at least as terrible and full of itself in its own piratey way as anything in Matrix 2/3.

edit: I mean shit the fights at the end of Pirates 3 / Revolutions were disappointing in pretty much the exact same way, except with ships instead of Smiths!