First Shot Over the Bow: A (Very) Preliminary Assessment of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"

It was a fairly hot day in Dover, at least by my standards, and I was happy to spend the midday hours holed up in the UNH library photocopying articles from journals I can't get ahold of back in Maine. I was particularly excited to finally put my hands on Itinerario 1999/2, which contains a series of excellent introductory essays on Atlantic History. I recommend it to students at all levels, from undergraduates to the most seasoned sailors in the field, and twice over to the surprisingly large number of faculty and graduate students in Atlantic history who confess to me that they haven't heard of it.

Since all work and no play makes Isaac a dull boy, my sisters and I decided to go out for the night. We went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", the sequel to one of my favorite movies, "The Curse of the Black Pearl" (2003). I'm going to give it another look-see before I pass final judgment, but my initial reaction is fairly negative. I wasn't expecting "Godfather II" or "The Empire Strikes Back", but what I found was something more along the lines of "Matrix Reloaded". With a few fleeting exceptions, both sequels were a confused, confusing mess of hastily thrown together images, ideas and special effects. The Disney team, like the Wachowski brothers before them, appears to be operating under the assumption that fans of the first installment were only into it for the eye candy (in fact, "Dead Man's Chest" even has its own bullet time sequence, just in case you might be able to stomach any more of it after it was overdone in the Matrix sequels). It is contrivedly self-referential, straining to force in throwback lines that could have been hilarious ("Why is all the rum gone?!") with no concern for whether or not they work their particular context.

Taken as a whole, "Dead Man's Chest" is one long, obnoxious litany of jokes and special effects. This is litany in the classical sense, a sermon of call and response delivered through the silver screen. A tentacle rends an unfortunate sloop asunder and the audience dutifully gasps, another line from the original is regurgitated and the faithful laugh on cue. Kraken, ooh; swordfight, aah; look-- there's that hampster wheel again! Did he just ask where the rum went? LOL! The special effects fall victim to the same unsophisticated overapplication. One of the most striking successes in "Curse of the Black Pearl" was the moonlight effect, where Industrial Light and Magic doled out its wares in carefully measured quantities. There is nothing subtle about the effects in "Dead Man's Chest". Instead of treating us to flirtatious moonlit glimpses of something beautiful, Disney parades its wares before our eyes until the figure is not so much nude as naked, an awkward and unsightly creature when viewed in the full light of day. Like so many other movie franchises, attendance at this second episode of the Pirates series has become a liturgical exercise, a public display of faith in the writers, directors, and producers. That faith is misplaced.

We all came here to worship, so most of us won't know the difference, but it's there right before our eyes-- wriggling around on deck in one scene and half-heartedly delivering poorly-written lines in running eyeliner in the next. In his review for the New York Times, A. O. Scott goes so far as to compare Orlando Bloom unfavorably to a piece of wood, and I can't say that I disagree with him. All of this is not to say that I hated the movie. I was pretty disappointed through the first hour and a half, but it grew up as it went along. More than anything I'm upset at the obvious lack of effort on the part of the creative team behind the film. "The Curse of the Black Pearl" was a genuinely clever movie, and in particular I was excited by the way in which it tapped into what we all love about pirates. The second film only taps into our love for Pirates (with a capital P), and even that is an uninspired and insincere attempt. What is it that we love about pirates? I'll have to leave my thoughts on that for a future post.

What I hope for at this point is that the crew at Disney can succeed where the Wachowski brothers did not, to right the ship and get back on course with the final installment of the trilogy (and please, please, leave it at a trilogy). To be fair to the Wachowskis, there was still something of substance to the Matrix sequels, you just had to be willing to sit through mind-numbingly protracted fight sequences to find it. Like the crew at the beginning of "Dead Man's Chest", we came back to the Pearl looking for something shiny, and instead find ourselves staring blankly at Captain Jack as he blathers unintelligibly about nothing at all. A more accurate assessment of what was done to the Pirates franchise is what happened to other Disney classics like "The Lion King" and "The Little Mermaid". Does anyone even remember the names of their sequels? Screenwriters, ye be warned.