In case anyone’s wondering, I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest the day before it opened and liked it, on balance. Not unlike the first film, the first hour takes a while to set up all the various plot threads, but the final hour is pure action-comedy gold. (I’m not sure where that leaves the middle half-hour.)
The special effects in particular are truly a thing to behold; while I’m normally more of a skeleton man than a sea-monster man, I have to admit that the villains of this film are much more alive, much more creaturely, than the villains of the previous entry.
It must also be said that this movie knows how to be a sequel in a way that, e.g., Superman Returns does not; instead of merely recycling scenarios and lines of dialogue from the first film, Dead Man’s Chest puts a new spin on most of the bits that it borrows from Curse of the Black Pearl, and it thereby keeps them fresh.
All this is prelude to the real reason I’m writing this post. I came across this interesting interview with the writers of the Pirates franchise at BoxOfficeMojo.com, and I think the following excerpt is especially interesting (oh, and possible spoiler alert):
Ted Elliott: When we were writing and making the first movie, [we had in mind] the Sergio Leone [spaghetti] Westerns like The Man With No Name [movies]. The Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef characters are essentially gods compared to all these mortals. They can shoot better, they can ride better, they’re smarter, they’re faster and they don’t say much. To some extent, that’s what we were playing in the first [Pirates], that Jack and [Captain] Barbossa [played by Geoffrey Rush] are kind of pirate gods. They come into the lives of these two mortal characters—
Terry Rossio: —and we continue that into At World’s End—
Ted Elliott: —and, to some extent, Jack is the demi-god, the trickster. He straddles both sides. Is he on the side of the gods—is he opposed to the gods?—is he on the side of the mortals? He’s on his own side.
Terry Rossio: You can also track the dialog in those [spaghetti Westerns]: the less words you say, the more god-like you are—and, in Pirates of the Caribbean [pictures]—
Ted Elliott: —pirates talk.
Terry Rossio: —the less Johnny says, the more truthful he is. The more words he uses, the more you should mistrust him.
Ted Elliott: So, yes, there is some conscious thought given to the behavior of Jack Sparrow.
For what that’s worth. Oh, one last thought on the film: It boggles my mind that Dead Man’s Chest currently ranks a mere 54% at RottenTomatoes.com, while much bigger summertime disappointments like Superman Returns (75%), Cars (76%) and even X-Men: The Last Stand (57%) have all scored higher.
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