![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The first PotC movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, was better than it had any right to be. It took a simple, but compelling premise (PIRATES!), added a cool twist for the new millennium (ZOMBIES!), then threw in Johnny Depp’s impression of a Rolling Stones front man for good measure. Really, as far as blockbusters go, it was one of the greats.
Naturally, when it came time to make a sequel, things went apeshit.
There’d been no loose ends to tie up from the first movie (except for that zombie monkey, but zombie monkeys are notoriously difficult to build a movie around). Everyone was happy, the bad guys were either dead or in jail, and in general there was no real need to visit the PotC universe aside from money. That’s not to say it would be impossible… movie history is filled with sequels that didn’t need to happen but are pretty awesome anyway… but it would take some smart thinking to come up with a story as strong as the first, and even smarter to come up with one that could sustain itself over two three-hour movies. Sadly, what we got was a sequel that either vaguely disappointed you or inspired active hating. Here’s ten things that stood out to me.
1. The eyeball scene.
After a brief prologue in which new villain Cutter (really?) Beckett shows up to arrest Will and Elizabeth for helping Jack escape – which is news to anyone who watched the first movie, as Elizabeth just stood around and looked pretty. And who reported it anyway? – and, after three long years, we would get to see Captain Jack having more wacky adventures!
( Or not. )
Yes, for some reason we’re introduced to Jack Sparrow as he escapes from a hellish prison where crows pluck out your eyeballs. Now, I’m one to shake my head at critics who complain about a movie being nasty or unpleasant, but this is a family movie! Sure, the first one had some innuendo and scary parts and Elizabeth’s subplot was pretty much “I hope I know where my panties are in the morning,” but that could fly right over a kid’s head. This, however, is a crow plucking out a guy’s eyeball. Who did they think they were making this movie for? Johnny Depp plays a cartoon character, for Christ’s sake!
I can only conclude that they wanted to show everyone that (bam! Pow!) Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t for kids. That’s right, they made a darker, edger movie about a theme park ride. A Disney theme park ride.
Why couldn’t they have Jack Sparrow get the picture of the key by seducing a governor’s wife or raiding an ancient temple or capturing a ship or doing anything that’s at all swashbuckling? What was the point of this gratuitous nightmare fuel in a family film?
2. The reset button gets smacked, hard.
So during the first movie, there was some character development. Captain Jack started out seeming untrustworthy, but it turned out that he was a hero. Will and Elizabeth fell in love, which was nice. Even Norrington got over his insistence on rules and regulations to some degree.
Now we’re three years later. Captain Jack is now such an asshole that he sells out his best friend’s soul to sea-devil, Elizabeth is flirting with a man twice her age who canonically smells like he deodorizes with the floor of a gas station bathroom, and Norrington (who let Jack go in the first movie!) is now so obsessed with catching him that he sailed into a hurricane!
Wait a minute! Weren’t they all friends and partners at the end of Curse of the Black Pearl? Shouldn’t we skip all the in-fighting and get right to them being united against a common enemy? Nope. Everyone betrays everyone else, to the point where all the betrayals lose their dramatic power. I think even the parrot betrays them. This really culminates in the third movie, where even innocent, virtuous Will turns out to be a backstabber, but I thought I’d mention the start of the trend here.
2a. Pirates are heroes now.
So in real life, pirates were murderers and rapists. The first POTC movie retconned that a bit into them just being outlaws, while portraying the Brits as good guys too, just a bit bureaucratic and red-tapey. So there were good pirates and bad pirates, but none of them were really trustworthy. That worked, so long as you didn’t think about it.
Naturally, the second movie insists you think about it.
Like, remember those two pirates that shot the innocent person in the face in the first movie and presumably wanted to gang-rape Elizabeth once they turned mortal? Now they’re not only comic relief, they’re heroic comic relief. Pirates go from being part of the landscape to being the fucking Rebel Alliance!
Now, the way the movie tries to work around this unworkable tenet is to make the bad guys ridiculously evil. Not only is the East India Trading Company an EVIL MEGACORPORATION (in a Disney movie? Really?), but in the opening of the third movie, they hang a kid! What, were there no dogs around to kick? Instead of trying to make the movies ridiculously epic and pitting pirates against an Evil Empire, they should’ve told a smaller-scale story within the world of pirates and Redcoats. The moment Davy Jones starts working for the British Empire, the trilogy loses all hope. Because hey, remember those Redcoats that we established in the first movie were nice, brave soldiers? Now our heroes slaughter them by the dozen. While getting married, even. Fun!
3. All the call-backs.
Everyone likes a good running gag. After all, if you like a joke once, why not the same joke three times? DMC takes even that meager humor and runs it into the ground. Yeah, writers, we liked the first POTC too, you don’t have to remind us we’re watching the sequel to it every single minute.
Just going by IMDB: Cutler Beckett is corrected by Elizabeth and Will when he fails to refer to Jack Sparrow as 'Captain' (Jack insisted on being called 'Captain Jack Sparrow' in the first movie). - Governor Swann breaks off an arm of a candlestick inside the dungeon. (The same happened to Will in the Governor's house in the first movie.) - Jack saying "Why is the rum always gone?" (He asked Elizabeth the same twice in the first movie.) - Will gets slapped by a lady in Tortuga (Jack getting slapped by ladies he once mistreated was a running joke in the first film). - Jack says "Hide the rum" when Elizabeth arrives (Elizabeth burnt his rum in the first movie).
That’s not even all of them! Now, a few of those would’ve been funnier, but all of them make it pretty clear that this movie is riding on its prequel’s coat-tails. Instead of giving me a nostalgic glow, it just gave me gas.
Plus, the two skeevy pirates repeat their “’ello poppet” line to Elizabeth. Shouldn’t it be “’ello again, poppet”? Just throwing that out there.
4. Davy Jones’s accent.
Yes, we got used to it. Yes, it’s still ridiculous.
4a. The feminism.
So after all the writers' babble that Elizabeth is the real hero of the movies and she's OMGFEMINIST, at the end of the day, when the Kraken needs to be shot, who does it?
Captain Jack.
Was there any reason Elizabeth couldn't do it? If she were incapacitated or something, then I could understand Jack stepping and saving the day, but his character-arc-finishing return has no point! He could've made his getaway and Elizabeth could've shot the Kraken and everything would've been hunky-dory! Come on!
5. The dice game.
Including a game in any movie is a risky prospect. If the audience is familiar with it, it can be taken as is, but if they’re not, then they’re just watching a Byzantine list of whackiness happen. That can be used to good effect (like in Star Wars, when we get that they’re playing Holographic Space Chess without having any of the rules explained to us because it’s pretty self-evident and not important). But if the game’s outcome has a vital influence on the plot, it’s good to know what’s going on.
In Casino Royale, they changed the card game from an obscure one to Texas Hold ‘Em so that people could know what was going on, and then had the characters explain what was going on just for those of us who are a little mystified at the phenomenon of televised poker games.
According to IMDB: The dice game that Will Turner plays with Davy Jones is called Liar's Dice, a gambling game where each player has to make consecutively higher bids based upon how many of each die they claim are on the table (two threes, four fives, etc.), until a player is called a liar, in which case all the dice are shown and it's seen if the bid is correct. Normally a player only loses a die when caught in a lie and is not out of the game until he has lost all his dice.
Now, have you ever heard of Liar’s Dice? Because the only clue we get about it is Will saying “it’s a game of deception” and then wagering his immortal soul on the outcome. So we’re watching this tensely-filmed scene with suspenseful music about a game we don’t know the rules to! Did Will win? Did he lose? What’s going on?
6. “Abandon ship! Abandon ship or abandon hope!”
What does that even mean?
7. The jar of dirt.
Okay, so in the third movie we find out that as captain of the Flying Dutchman, Davy Jones can’t set food on land unless he has a bucket or a young girl is taking a bath like in that hentai I read. So, just in case they’re on sea when they have to call and say “hey, got your heart!”, Tia Dalma gives Jack a jar of dirt.
Keep in mind, Davy Jones can freely move around ships and the ocean. He’s done it the whole movie. There is literally no reason at all for that jar of dirt… except so that Norrington can trick everyone.
Bad, lazy writing.
8. The island sequence
No, I don’t think it’s racist and I actually do appreciate having the characters buckling some swashes in a swashbuckling movie… but couldn’t they think of a better way to do it than to throw in a cannibal subplot that has nothing to do with anything? We’ve got the characters breaking out of jail, being captured by sea monsters, being chased by Krakens… do we really need to throw in some random cannibals to put some action on the screen? Apparently, yes.
9. Screenwriters: Complicated = good.
Yes, the story of the first movie was complicated, but despite that, it was good. Why make the second movie even more impenetrable and stupidly writerly and just generally complex?
And I’m saying this as someone who could follow the story! One minute they’re after the key, then they’re going to Tia Dalma to find out why they need the key, then Jack has to get 99 souls to save his own skin… really, this story should’ve been streamlined way down. There’s no reason for all the complexity.
I mean, it’s all supposed to build up to the three-way swordfight, but there’s no reason at all Jack and Will can’t beat up Norrington, then make Davy Jones call the Kraken off, then kill him. Look, movie, you can either want us to be smart and engage with the movie and get embroiled in all this complexity, or you can tell us to shut our brains off and enjoy the pretty people sword-fighting. NOT BOTH!
10. And atheists everywhere shoot themselves in the head.
You remember how in the first movie, there was just the cursed Incan gold and everyone was shocked that it turned you into a skeleton if you took a piece? It’s a pretty integral part of the backstory that people were ignorant of supernatural shenanigans. If you knew there were such a thing as curses, why would you go after gold you knew was cursed?
But in the second movie, not only are there about a thousand sea monsters running around, but everyone and their mother knows about it! Cutter Beckett is all “shyeah, I know that!” blasé when he hears about the first curse, Captain Jack has a magic compass, Tia Dalma can raise the dead, there’s the Flying Dutchman with its pet squid going around killing people, apparently all pirates everywhere have a coin that they can use to turn on a distress signal with a song, and one of the pirates who got cursed in the first movie is using a magic plot coupon as a wooden eye!
I can only imagine how far they’ll take this in the fourth movie.
Naturally, when it came time to make a sequel, things went apeshit.
There’d been no loose ends to tie up from the first movie (except for that zombie monkey, but zombie monkeys are notoriously difficult to build a movie around). Everyone was happy, the bad guys were either dead or in jail, and in general there was no real need to visit the PotC universe aside from money. That’s not to say it would be impossible… movie history is filled with sequels that didn’t need to happen but are pretty awesome anyway… but it would take some smart thinking to come up with a story as strong as the first, and even smarter to come up with one that could sustain itself over two three-hour movies. Sadly, what we got was a sequel that either vaguely disappointed you or inspired active hating. Here’s ten things that stood out to me.
1. The eyeball scene.
After a brief prologue in which new villain Cutter (really?) Beckett shows up to arrest Will and Elizabeth for helping Jack escape – which is news to anyone who watched the first movie, as Elizabeth just stood around and looked pretty. And who reported it anyway? – and, after three long years, we would get to see Captain Jack having more wacky adventures!
( Or not. )
Yes, for some reason we’re introduced to Jack Sparrow as he escapes from a hellish prison where crows pluck out your eyeballs. Now, I’m one to shake my head at critics who complain about a movie being nasty or unpleasant, but this is a family movie! Sure, the first one had some innuendo and scary parts and Elizabeth’s subplot was pretty much “I hope I know where my panties are in the morning,” but that could fly right over a kid’s head. This, however, is a crow plucking out a guy’s eyeball. Who did they think they were making this movie for? Johnny Depp plays a cartoon character, for Christ’s sake!
I can only conclude that they wanted to show everyone that (bam! Pow!) Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t for kids. That’s right, they made a darker, edger movie about a theme park ride. A Disney theme park ride.
Why couldn’t they have Jack Sparrow get the picture of the key by seducing a governor’s wife or raiding an ancient temple or capturing a ship or doing anything that’s at all swashbuckling? What was the point of this gratuitous nightmare fuel in a family film?
2. The reset button gets smacked, hard.
So during the first movie, there was some character development. Captain Jack started out seeming untrustworthy, but it turned out that he was a hero. Will and Elizabeth fell in love, which was nice. Even Norrington got over his insistence on rules and regulations to some degree.
Now we’re three years later. Captain Jack is now such an asshole that he sells out his best friend’s soul to sea-devil, Elizabeth is flirting with a man twice her age who canonically smells like he deodorizes with the floor of a gas station bathroom, and Norrington (who let Jack go in the first movie!) is now so obsessed with catching him that he sailed into a hurricane!
Wait a minute! Weren’t they all friends and partners at the end of Curse of the Black Pearl? Shouldn’t we skip all the in-fighting and get right to them being united against a common enemy? Nope. Everyone betrays everyone else, to the point where all the betrayals lose their dramatic power. I think even the parrot betrays them. This really culminates in the third movie, where even innocent, virtuous Will turns out to be a backstabber, but I thought I’d mention the start of the trend here.
2a. Pirates are heroes now.
So in real life, pirates were murderers and rapists. The first POTC movie retconned that a bit into them just being outlaws, while portraying the Brits as good guys too, just a bit bureaucratic and red-tapey. So there were good pirates and bad pirates, but none of them were really trustworthy. That worked, so long as you didn’t think about it.
Naturally, the second movie insists you think about it.
Like, remember those two pirates that shot the innocent person in the face in the first movie and presumably wanted to gang-rape Elizabeth once they turned mortal? Now they’re not only comic relief, they’re heroic comic relief. Pirates go from being part of the landscape to being the fucking Rebel Alliance!
Now, the way the movie tries to work around this unworkable tenet is to make the bad guys ridiculously evil. Not only is the East India Trading Company an EVIL MEGACORPORATION (in a Disney movie? Really?), but in the opening of the third movie, they hang a kid! What, were there no dogs around to kick? Instead of trying to make the movies ridiculously epic and pitting pirates against an Evil Empire, they should’ve told a smaller-scale story within the world of pirates and Redcoats. The moment Davy Jones starts working for the British Empire, the trilogy loses all hope. Because hey, remember those Redcoats that we established in the first movie were nice, brave soldiers? Now our heroes slaughter them by the dozen. While getting married, even. Fun!
3. All the call-backs.
Everyone likes a good running gag. After all, if you like a joke once, why not the same joke three times? DMC takes even that meager humor and runs it into the ground. Yeah, writers, we liked the first POTC too, you don’t have to remind us we’re watching the sequel to it every single minute.
Just going by IMDB: Cutler Beckett is corrected by Elizabeth and Will when he fails to refer to Jack Sparrow as 'Captain' (Jack insisted on being called 'Captain Jack Sparrow' in the first movie). - Governor Swann breaks off an arm of a candlestick inside the dungeon. (The same happened to Will in the Governor's house in the first movie.) - Jack saying "Why is the rum always gone?" (He asked Elizabeth the same twice in the first movie.) - Will gets slapped by a lady in Tortuga (Jack getting slapped by ladies he once mistreated was a running joke in the first film). - Jack says "Hide the rum" when Elizabeth arrives (Elizabeth burnt his rum in the first movie).
That’s not even all of them! Now, a few of those would’ve been funnier, but all of them make it pretty clear that this movie is riding on its prequel’s coat-tails. Instead of giving me a nostalgic glow, it just gave me gas.
Plus, the two skeevy pirates repeat their “’ello poppet” line to Elizabeth. Shouldn’t it be “’ello again, poppet”? Just throwing that out there.
4. Davy Jones’s accent.
Yes, we got used to it. Yes, it’s still ridiculous.
4a. The feminism.
So after all the writers' babble that Elizabeth is the real hero of the movies and she's OMGFEMINIST, at the end of the day, when the Kraken needs to be shot, who does it?
Captain Jack.
Was there any reason Elizabeth couldn't do it? If she were incapacitated or something, then I could understand Jack stepping and saving the day, but his character-arc-finishing return has no point! He could've made his getaway and Elizabeth could've shot the Kraken and everything would've been hunky-dory! Come on!
5. The dice game.
Including a game in any movie is a risky prospect. If the audience is familiar with it, it can be taken as is, but if they’re not, then they’re just watching a Byzantine list of whackiness happen. That can be used to good effect (like in Star Wars, when we get that they’re playing Holographic Space Chess without having any of the rules explained to us because it’s pretty self-evident and not important). But if the game’s outcome has a vital influence on the plot, it’s good to know what’s going on.
In Casino Royale, they changed the card game from an obscure one to Texas Hold ‘Em so that people could know what was going on, and then had the characters explain what was going on just for those of us who are a little mystified at the phenomenon of televised poker games.
According to IMDB: The dice game that Will Turner plays with Davy Jones is called Liar's Dice, a gambling game where each player has to make consecutively higher bids based upon how many of each die they claim are on the table (two threes, four fives, etc.), until a player is called a liar, in which case all the dice are shown and it's seen if the bid is correct. Normally a player only loses a die when caught in a lie and is not out of the game until he has lost all his dice.
Now, have you ever heard of Liar’s Dice? Because the only clue we get about it is Will saying “it’s a game of deception” and then wagering his immortal soul on the outcome. So we’re watching this tensely-filmed scene with suspenseful music about a game we don’t know the rules to! Did Will win? Did he lose? What’s going on?
6. “Abandon ship! Abandon ship or abandon hope!”
What does that even mean?
7. The jar of dirt.
Okay, so in the third movie we find out that as captain of the Flying Dutchman, Davy Jones can’t set food on land unless he has a bucket or a young girl is taking a bath like in that hentai I read. So, just in case they’re on sea when they have to call and say “hey, got your heart!”, Tia Dalma gives Jack a jar of dirt.
Keep in mind, Davy Jones can freely move around ships and the ocean. He’s done it the whole movie. There is literally no reason at all for that jar of dirt… except so that Norrington can trick everyone.
Bad, lazy writing.
8. The island sequence
No, I don’t think it’s racist and I actually do appreciate having the characters buckling some swashes in a swashbuckling movie… but couldn’t they think of a better way to do it than to throw in a cannibal subplot that has nothing to do with anything? We’ve got the characters breaking out of jail, being captured by sea monsters, being chased by Krakens… do we really need to throw in some random cannibals to put some action on the screen? Apparently, yes.
9. Screenwriters: Complicated = good.
Yes, the story of the first movie was complicated, but despite that, it was good. Why make the second movie even more impenetrable and stupidly writerly and just generally complex?
And I’m saying this as someone who could follow the story! One minute they’re after the key, then they’re going to Tia Dalma to find out why they need the key, then Jack has to get 99 souls to save his own skin… really, this story should’ve been streamlined way down. There’s no reason for all the complexity.
I mean, it’s all supposed to build up to the three-way swordfight, but there’s no reason at all Jack and Will can’t beat up Norrington, then make Davy Jones call the Kraken off, then kill him. Look, movie, you can either want us to be smart and engage with the movie and get embroiled in all this complexity, or you can tell us to shut our brains off and enjoy the pretty people sword-fighting. NOT BOTH!
10. And atheists everywhere shoot themselves in the head.
You remember how in the first movie, there was just the cursed Incan gold and everyone was shocked that it turned you into a skeleton if you took a piece? It’s a pretty integral part of the backstory that people were ignorant of supernatural shenanigans. If you knew there were such a thing as curses, why would you go after gold you knew was cursed?
But in the second movie, not only are there about a thousand sea monsters running around, but everyone and their mother knows about it! Cutter Beckett is all “shyeah, I know that!” blasé when he hears about the first curse, Captain Jack has a magic compass, Tia Dalma can raise the dead, there’s the Flying Dutchman with its pet squid going around killing people, apparently all pirates everywhere have a coin that they can use to turn on a distress signal with a song, and one of the pirates who got cursed in the first movie is using a magic plot coupon as a wooden eye!
I can only imagine how far they’ll take this in the fourth movie.
