Here is my audio review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

 

 

When I came out of the screening for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on Wednesday last week, the publicist’s rep, as is her mandate, asked me what I thought of the movie.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s not over yet.”

For that is the big news for viewers who don’t keep up with all the details of the big summer releases on the chat boards and at AICN. Pirates doesn’t conclude. It just stops. It closes on a cliffhanger, while bringing back a major character from the previous film. If you happen to love the Pirates series, don’t make any other plans for May 25th, 2007.

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do stay through the credits. Not only do you get to hear more of Hans Zimmer’s score, but also there is a narrative surprise in the final five seconds.

Anyway, Pirates 2 ends with disaster looming over everyone, in the fine tradition of cliffhangers since time immemorial, or at least since the Perils of Pauline. But I bow to the prevailing notion that people read the Internet not to know what’s going on in the world, and so I won’t describe these numerous poised disasters, on the off chance that you are reading this before seeing the film. Just visualize in your mind The Empire Strikes Back, and you’re in the same ballpark.

 

 

Though the chances are good that while watching Pirates you will also think of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lost, Apocalypse Now (when the travelers go up river to meet a new character, Tia Dalma, played by Naomie Harris), even SNL‘s Mr. Bill (during a moment when Jack Sparrow falls through a succession of rope bridges), and a few other movies that aren’t so much quoted as alluded to in passing, works which it seems are now so much a part of the culture that screenwriters draw upon them without thinking, as they might have a concentrating person jump when a friend comes up from behind and touches them, or as they might type “neither here nor there” or “be that as it may.”

 

 

Credited screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio apparently thought that what everyone liked most about the first Pirates were the stunts, the thrills, the suspense. In a film that was built around Johnny Depp as “Captain” Jack Sparrow, and who brought great charm and wit to his Bob Hopian turn as a cowardly and opportunistic rogue, all its $653 million dollars intake told the producers was, “More monsters! More explosions! More hairbreadth escapes! More big scenes! Just big, big bigger!” Of course, the show is based on a Disneyland ride, but that’s not why people liked it. Instead the public enjoyed it because of its mature wit and integration of the “thrill ride” elements into a relatively well-crafted plot that mocked its genre without disparaging it and didn’t insult the adult viewer’s intelligence.

 

 

But intelligence, it seems, is neither here nor there. The new film plunges the viewer into the story in media res as Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) are arrested at the direction of a new character, the oily Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), local representative of the East India Trading Company at Port Royal, Jamaica. This arrest is really a bargaining chip to get Turner to get Jack Sparrow to get Beckett the key to the fabled Dead Man’s Chest, which doesn’t mean in this film what it means in seafaring lore.

 

 

From there things fall apart. And we’re only five minutes into the film. Every character has a task or a goal. Sometimes they have tasks within goals. It’s hard to keep them straight, especially when the tasks are modified or expanded due to new circumstances or new characters. The goal of Governor Weatherby Swann (Jonathan Pryce, who talks the way Hilary Duff and every other teen pop idols sing) is to keep his daughter alive, to which end he must … I forget. Elizabeth’s goal is to fetch Will, to which end she escapes from prison and stows away on a ship whose name, crew, purpose, and destination evaporate from the mind even as events are happening, like invisible ink. Will’s goal is already stated, and Jack’s is to rescue his soul or fate or something from the clutches of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, unrecognizable beneath tentacles), who in this text is a deadly demon who haunts the seas and directs a huge monster to swallow the ships crewed by his enemies. I think so, anyway, and I forget what Jones’s goal is. Oh, yeah, to get Jack’s soul. I think.

 

 

As I was watching the film, I couldn’t help but think that it was more like an animated movie than a fun, frolicsome yarn. All gags, emotions, and facial expressions are big, and set-ups and situations are like those in a cartoon, impossible and gravity defying. Of course, in a sense all films these days are animated, at least to a certain degree, and there is the merest bat-wing’s whisper of high seriousness in having a representative of corporate imperialism be the human villain. But otherwise this impression was confirmed in a way by the credits of the writers, who have been associated with *Shrek, Antz, Aladdin, and Little Monsters, making them obviously the Disney house scribes. Well, I guess in the eyes of corporate media we are all seven-yeas-old now, a perhaps justified assumption. For me, the film just wasn’t funny, except for a line of Jack’s when he is telling Elizabeth how she should dress and what he has, or doesn’t have, in his cabin for such purposes, or one of the two scenes on the beach (there’s two of everything in this film), with Elizabeth hopping around on the sand trying to get the attention of the fighting boys. Otherwise Pirates part two appears to have been constructed with a dead man’s hand.

 

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