You only say "opening" because you apparently didn't see the later ones...
The "special" effects largely consisted of someone off-screen throwing, in slow motion, entire barrels of wood chips out of what would be the cabin door under the poop deck.
Yeah, they kept doing that in every battle scene and it did get kind of old kind of fast.
The Admiral in charge gets shot, and sends an "all captains repair on board" signal to his fleet, apparently immediately, and the captains go. Some of them apparently by swimming. In the middle of a major fleet engagement.
This sort of thing was the other major flaw in the movie (IMO): the ridiculously fast pace of the overall battles and how crazy close together the ships were (on each side) before engagement.
I realize that such slow-paced stuff like a pre-steamship naval battle is going to be difficult to depict on screen, but regardless,
this is not the way to do it.
Perhaps some off-screen narration, time cuts, something to help the viewer get a feel for what it might have been like, yet also understand what actually occurred, I really don't know.
But the ships scurrying around the ocean like "units" in a game of Starcraft just didn't work for me...
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