Executive summary: this movie was not nearly as terrible as Pirates 3. (Really, that's not saying much; Pirates 3 was basically the absolute worst movie I have ever seen.)

These were my thoughts after seeing Pirates 4 (On Stranger Tides) last night. Spoilers ahead.

There were some enjoyable moments, and I even laughed at several points, but come on. Disney apparently has no good writers these days. At all. The plot was just...bad.

You can only pile so many unbelievable, supernatural plot devices atop one another before the movie starts to suck. At some point, you have to stop using supernatural crap as a crutch and actually do some character development and come up with a halfway interesting plot. (Pirates 3 was terrible in this regard; not only did it have a ton of ridicuous supernatural crap, it had about 30 uninteresting, intertwined, hideously complicated subplots. Pirates 4 did a better job, but the writers still need to quit using every ridiculous supernatural element they can think of just to avoid actual creativity.)

I did enjoy a line near the beginning of the movie where Keith Richards made a comment about looking dead, or being dead, or something. (It's funny because I'm pretty sure that, in real life, he's actually a zombie.) And the music was appropriately epic throughout the film.

There was one point where I swear they were going to a flashback - they had appropriate sound playing and everything - but the movie never actually cut to the flashback. The character just narrated it for a few minutes, and the camera just watches him talk. I can only assume they ran out of money before they actually managed to film the flashback.

Re: the whole mermaid/missionary subplot - WTF was that? It came out of nowhere, three-quarters of the way through the film; and not only was the subplot totally undeveloped, but the characters involved were barely even one-dimensional. It was kind of a "oh yeah, and this happened too" deal. This is still better than Pirates 3 - which was, as I recall, just 20 or 30 unrelated, poorly written subplots duck-taped together - but it was still terrible and distracting from the rest of the film.

(As long as I'm taking about the characters, I think there was only one character who even began to escape from one-dimensionality. /sigh)

The movie was clearly left open for a sequel (ugh). In fact, there were about 5 different moments that I swore were the end of the movie, only to be sadly disappointed when we had to go conclude another subplot. Except that nothing actually concluded; the writers left just about every possible opening they could for a fifth movie.

The plot was, generally, obvious and easily predicatable. While watching, I could usually predict in great detail what was about to happen. There was absolutely no suspense, nor were there any surprises...

• "Oh, I'll bet he switched the chalices"
• "And now we cut to Barbossa to reinforce that point"
• "And it turns out it's actually Jack Sparrow"

I had more, but I'm too tired to finish writing now.

Conclusion: there are a few good moments, but go see Thor instead. Don't let your friends tell you Pirates 4 is way better than Pirates 3. It is (marginally) better, but let's face it - anything is better than Pirates 3.

Finally: this.