This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:
Comment: This blog is either madness or brilliance.
Dusty: It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide.
Rating: PG-13
Director: Gore Verbinski
Writers: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie
Stars: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, Keira Knightley
Release Date: July 9, 2003
Run time: 2 hours, 23 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
In the early 18th century, Governor Weatherby Swann and his daughter, Elizabeth, sail aboard the HMS Dauntless, which is captained by Lieutenant Norrington. They encounter a shipwreck and rescue a boy named Will Turner. Elizabeth notices a gold medallion around Will’s neck and takes it while he is unconscious, before seeing a ghostly ship sailing away. Eight years later in Port Royal, Jamaica, Captain Norrington is being promoted to commodore while Will works as a blacksmith. Jack Sparrow, a pirate captain, arrives in Port Royal seeking a ship.
Norrington proposes to Elizabeth atop a cliff, but she faints and falls into the ocean due to her tight-fitting corset, causing the medallion she is carrying to emit a pulse. Jack rescues Elizabeth and discovers the medallion. Governor Swann orders Jack’s execution after he is identified as a pirate, but Jack flees into Will’s smithy, where he is caught after Will duels him to a stalemate.
That night, Port Royal is attacked by the pirate crew of the Black Pearl, who are in search of the medallion. They take Elizabeth hostage to meet Captain Barbossa after she identifies herself as “Elizabeth Turner”. Barbossa explains that the medallion is one of 882 cursed gold pieces used to bribe Hernán Cortés to stop his slaughter of the Aztecs. After finding and stealing the cursed gold at Isla de Muerta, the crew became cursed undead zombies who cannot feel pleasure or pain. To lift the curse, the crew has returned all the gold with an offering of blood from each member, but one medallion belonging to “Bootstrap” Bill Turner, a crew member thrown overboard after the theft, is missing. Believing Elizabeth to be Bootstrap’s daughter, Barbossa intends to use her blood for the ritual.
Intent on rescuing Elizabeth, Will frees Jack, and together they steal the HMS Interceptor. They escape to Tortuga to recruit a crew from Joshamee Gibbs, who reveals Jack as the previous captain of the Black Pearl, whom Barbossa mutinied against and marooned on a deserted island. On Isla de Muerta, they sneak into the treasure grotto where Barbossa fails to lift the curse using Elizabeth’s blood. Will and Elizabeth escape with her medallion, but Jack is captured and imprisoned on the Pearl. A battle erupts between the ships, crippling the Interceptor. When Will learns that Bootstrap was his father, he surrenders, but threatens to kill himself unless Elizabeth and the crew are left unharmed. Barbossa imprisons the crew and maroons Jack and Elizabeth on the same island that Jack was previously exiled to. Jack reveals that the island was used as a rum smuggling cache for rum runners, who rescued him after only three days. Elizabeth signals for help using a bonfire fueled by the rum, leading the Royal Navy to rescue them. She agrees to marry Norrington if he saves Will from Barbossa.
Jack and Norrington concoct a plan to ambush the pirates at Isla de Muerta, but Jack reveals himself to the pirates and convinces Barbossa to delay lifting the curse until after killing Norrington’s men. After Barbossa’s crew leaves, Jack frees Will and attacks Barbossa, having surreptitiously pocketed a medallion to give himself immortality. Elizabeth frees Jack’s crew on the Pearl, but they refuse to help and sail away without her. Jack shoots Barbossa just as Will returns his and Jack’s medallions to the chest with their blood, breaking the curse and killing Barbossa. The remaining pirates are immediately defeated by the Navy.
At Port Royal, where Jack is to be imminently hanged for his crimes, Will declares his love for Elizabeth before rescuing Jack. Jack and Will are surrounded by Norrington’s soldiers, but Elizabeth stands with Will, forcing Governor Swann to order the soldiers to stand down. Jack falls into the sea and is picked up by the Black Pearl. Norrington accepts that Elizabeth loves Will, and decides to give Jack a head start before pursuing him. Governor Swann gives his blessing to Will and Elizabeth, while Jack becomes captain of the Pearl once again.
In a post-credits scene, Jack, Barbossa’s pet monkey, climbs onto the chest of gold in the cave on Isla de Muerta and takes a coin from it, becoming undead once more.
My Review:
Prior to my rewatch, I had not seen Pirates of the Caribbean since it was in theaters more than twenty years ago and I have seen none of the sequels, thus I came into this with a relatively clean slate view of the film and the franchise. I can report back today that this was a significant oversight that I intend to rectify. This is a film without any significant flaws. I thoroughly it in every respect. It’s beautifully shot, the action scenes are excellent and immersive, the costuming is incredible, the CGI is as good as anything being done today, the plot kept me on the edge of my seat, the dialogue is top tier, whether that be via comedy or witty one-liners, and most importantly it’s flawlessly cast.
I’ll actually take that a step farther. Johnny Depp is so good in the role of Captain Jack Sparrow that any future attempts to recast the character are inconceivable to me. The best any future follow-ups could do are either a total reimagining of the character or a poor imitation. The franchise would be wise to either continue making future films with Depp in the role as captain, or to wait an entire generation before even letting someone else make an attempt at being Captain Jack. Depp’s charm and charisma are both immense and unique to himself. Blending his personality to this Trickster-Pirate archetypal character created something audiences hadn’t seen before and wont’ see again.
Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley were both also great in this movie. Bloom is fantastic as the young, idealistic, strong, but with a lot still to learn about the world Will Turner. This role was one of Bloom’s earliest, and was part of what might be the best start to a film career anyone has ever had: Between 2001 and 2004, Bloom filmed The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Black Hawn Down, Ned Kelly, Pirates, Troy, and Kingdom of Heaven. Knightley was also very early in her career here, too, and was only eighteen years old when this movie was released. Unlike Bloom, she did quite a bit of work as a child actress – including most famously Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – and her performance in this role conveys that experience. She sells me on being high born and recklessly adventure seeking. That said, once you allow yourself to be aware of her age, watching Knightley here is a bit uncomfortable. Bloom is eight years her senior in this movie, and Johnny Depp is more than twenty years older than she is. The film cannot hide that she is beautiful (she is cast in a romance arc at least partly for that reason) and fortunately it it avoids sexualizing her. She’s always dressed appropriately and she is not physical with her co-stars. And yet… even the family-friendly banter and flirting is uncomfortable when you realize she wasn’t yet an adult during filming. I guess it’s to her credit (either her talent as an actress or the genetics of her face) that she succeeded in playing a few years older than her real age, but it’s still a bit uncomfortable to watch.
The not-so-secret of the success of this film and its follow-ups is the score / soundtrack. It’s amazing. You can listen to the Pirates theme and feel something inside your soul stirring you toward salt water, wooden ships, danger, and adventure.
Do I have any nitpicks with this film? Not directly. It’s a truly top tier movie without any obvious weaknesses. Indirectly though, there is a part of me that can observe the thing I’m enjoying from outside of myself and recognize that I’m being spoon-fed delicious ‘Pirate Propaganda.’ There’s long been a certain amount of romanticism surrounding pirates. The whole point of this movie, to some extent, is the argument that you can be both a thieving, trickster, drunken, womanizing pirate and also a good man. Were real pirates good men? No. They were thieves, rapists, slavers, and murderers. They weren’t honor-bound to a code of ethics that would regularly entrap them. Pirates were the violent lawless narco-traffickers of their era. Will we someday have a genre of books and films depicting modern day drug cartels as misunderstood scamps and tricksters with hearts of gold? Perhaps. Probably.
The movie is rated PG-13 and to some extent that rating is warranted. There is a lot of violence (though it is the variety where you know someone was injured or killed but you don’t *really* see it) and the primary plot surrounds the idea that the pirates of the Black Pearl need both to return a cursed treasure and to spill some of the blood of the men who took is as a repayment. This could also have been gory or macabre, but it really wasn’t – at least not visually. The ghost versions of the pirates looked great, but they were not fear-inducing in appearance. They looked a lot more like what you might expect to see accompanying a theme park ride about pirate ghosts – which I suppose is fitting. There’s a bit of drunkenness in the film, but it’s primarily a vehicle for comedy and not overtly celebrated (though the comedy does give it kind of a tinge of coolness, I suppose.) I would have no issues with letting an older tween or a teenager watch this movie, though you might want to preview it if any of the above sounds concerning.
So there you have it. For all the stated reasons (and in spite of some observations), I enjoyed the movie, I recommend it, and I will be watching its sequels.
Have you seen Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl? If so, what did you think?
