While watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, I honestly thought I was seeing Bill Nighy, the actor, in a marvelous animatronic prosthetic mask. After all, after reading the coffee-table book No Strings Attached: The Inside Story of Jim Henson's Creature Shop I have had no doubts about what can be accomplished with computerized controllers and motorized armatures in rubber. I thought for sure that's what I was seeing but... damn you, George Lucas! Industrial Light and Magic got me again. Alas, Nighy was never on camera.

The character of Davy Jones was totally Jar-Jar Binks and Gollum; it was 100% computer-generated graphics based on Nighy as a motion model (above left photo), rendered as a computer-generated figure (above center) and finally ray-traced, shaded and colorized into an animated cartoon character (above right) that fooled me completely.

Before I congratulate ILM on a job well done (I'll let the Academy do that; POTC:AWE has been nominated for Makeup and Visual Effects) I must reiterate how much I hate CGI. My reasons remain the same: I guess I was born 100 years too late and am therefore really a steampunk at heart. When given the options of building a clock or of drawing an animated picture of a clock, I appreciate the artist but I appreciate the watchmaker more. I guess the underlying thought is that a machine is something real. You can touch it. It can actually do real work which is why I loved Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet and hated the robots in I, Robot. Robbie could actually clean up. The only people cleaning up today are the geeks at ILM, Digital Domain and Weta Digital.

As for the movie itself, I rather hope that's the last of the series. You'll notice that POTC:AWE is not up for any other Academy Awards unless they have a new category called "Most Plots At One Time And All Of Them Confusing" that I haven't heard about yet.