A lavishly produced children’s fantasy featuring Johnny Depp (as Jack Sparrow) , Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann), Jack Davenport (Norrington), Bill Nighy (Davy Jones), Jonathan Pryce (Governor Weatherby Swann ).
But by “produced,” I mostly mean special effects, beyond-this-world make-up, fantastic animations and visual pyrotechnics and not necessarily the story or the acting.
I probably have lost my sense of making coherent connections out of broken bits of narration because throughout the movie I couldn’t help but wonder … “what the hell is really going on here?”
A few facts that I was certain of… there is a pirate named Jack Sparrow and his ship The Black Pearl. A lot of people do not like this sneaky, shifty, cowardly and decidedly effeminate character. A very strange “pirate” indeed. Repulsive. Period.
The real hero is Will Turner, the handsome Orlando Bloom, who is willing to face great danger in order to rescue his love Elizabeth Swann from a British dungeon. Turner is asked to go get Jack Sparrow’s magical compass back to the British Lord Cuttler Beckett. But what do you know? Lady Swann somehow escapes from the dungeon on her own accord (those easy-to-escape inferior-quality British dungeons) and joins the crew of a seafaring ship disguised as a man (and no one can tell).
Okay, so we have the compass. Just when you think this is Hitchcock’s MacGuffin at work, we are introduced other MacGuffins in a hurry… a key… a “missing chest” with a heart in it, a jar filled with magic sand, and then comes the notorious ghost ship Flying Dutchman run by the antagonist Davy Jones…
Okay – thirteen years earlier Flying Dutchman’s Davy Jones raised The Black Pearl from the bottom of the ocean and made Jack its captain. So now Jack owes his life to Octopus-face Jones? Something like that.
Oh, there is also this island Tortuga where “the savages” live, by the way. Lots of “Indiana Jones” eye-candy cartoon art… flimsy swinging rope bridges over deep ravines and similar tricks of trade… that sort of thing. They capture Jack Swann and first treat him like a King and then chase him all over the island to cook him like a rotisserie chicken. But I digress…
I’d say most of the movie focuses on Davy Jones, a half-human half-octopus pirate running a crew of souls enslaved forever but not before transforming into slimy and mind-bending fantastic sea-creatures, complete with carbuncles and gills and wet tentacles, you name it… William Turner’s missing father is one such captured soul that cannot find an easy way out of his enslavement.
I won’t reveal more of the plot since I didn’t understand most of it anyways… but let’s suffice it to say that at the end Jack Sparrow performs an act of supreme heroism and self sacrifice to save William Turner and his gorgeous dame in a final bravura of visual Shaza Kawabanga Big Bang!
This film made hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney across the world. So I’m not questioning its success as a commercial vehicle. But I would’ve enjoyed it even more if I also did understand the multiple story lines running amok in every direction pointed at by Jack Sparrow’s hyper-active windmill of a compass.