PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN DEAD MAN'S CHEST & AT WORLD'S END are two of the most gloriously weird (and fun) big budget sequels of all time. Long, messy, indulgent, but adorned with insane visual exuberance few Hollywood films rival.There is a sword fight inside a hamster wheel.

Both PIRATES sequels are unquestionably flawed; they are exercises in reckless maximalism and too-much-ness, as if you had to eat ice cream for lunch and dinner. I refuse to hold those flaws against DEAD MAN'S CHEST when there's an unbroken shot of a pirate ship diving underwater

AT WORLD'S END gets lost in its Hawksian plotting and overblown mythology, but I appreciate how it tries to be the ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST for the pirate genre, an epic swan song for swashbucklers & the characters both as they fade into a mythic, green sunset.

Davy Jones is the greatest CGI creation of all time. 14 years later, he is still the holy grail of CGI magic and performance capture that gives him an astounding physicality, channeled by the amazing Bill Nighy. Thanos, Snoke and the Na'Vi are very good, but not THIS good:

Both the PIRATES and MATRIX sequels were clearly trying to ape STAR WARS and THE LORD OF THE RINGS at once:

shooting back to back and share a nearly identical structure
main character dies/coma at end of 2nd movie
first third of the third movie is Jabba's Palace

I really wish THE RISE OF SKYWALKER went full cosmic weirdness like AT WORLD'S END.

Worth noting, whatever problems were in Trevorrow's DUEL OF THE FATES, it actually did this.

https://twitter.com/edckbar875/status/1247312476821024769?s=20