The pillage people
Pirates of the Caribbean sails all-too-familiar waters
The entire pirate mythos is a powerful one. What American adult can’t rattle off two-dozen or more pirate-related pop-culture idioms, from “Shiver me timbers” to “Captain Morgan”? But the pirate archetype these days is more often panned than revered. No child really considers Capt. Hook and company scary. Sea scabs are more likely “Simpsons” jokes than the stuff of nightmares.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney attempts to rehabilitate the beleaguered seafarers and make them legendary — and horrifying — again. It excavates the common buccaneer vernacular and adds in a treasure trove of more material, which should, in theory, produce the quintessential pirate movie. Unfortunately the weight of the booty itself nearly sinks the expedition.
Not that Pirates is without its merits. It begins on a particularly creepy note, as a little girl on board a grandiose ship drifts through a dense fog, and a sailor announces that “cursed pirates” sail these waters. An unconscious boy strapped to a raft floats into sight, the victim of another vessel that said pirates have burned in the distance. The girl pockets the rescued boy’s necklace, a gold doubloon with a daunting skull marking.
Skip ahead eight years when the girl, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), is now the teenage daughter of the governor of Port Royal, a British colony somewhere in the Caribbean. The boy, Will, has grown up to be hunky Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings), the village smithy who has the major hots for Elizabeth, despite the fact she’s betrothed to another.
Elizabeth’s sudden itch to wear the pilfered necklace coincides with the arrival of Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), an out-of-luck marauder who steps into town off the mast of a sinking ship and attempts to steal a new vessel. When Elizabeth nearly drowns, that pesky doubloon somehow summons the Black Pearl, a notorious pirate ship that attacks the town that night. The sailors, daunting enough by day, show up under moonlight as an undead army of skeletons, thanks to a cache of cursed Aztec gold they once plundered.
Elizabeth, of course, gets kidnapped by the bone brigade, which leads to an unlikely alliance between Will and Jack to rescue her. Ample swashbuckling ensues, with a frantic sea chase and a slew of double- crossing plot twists. The whole ordeal would border on ridiculous were it not for the watertight script by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, co-writers of Shrek.
But the plot’s finer points are undercut by the number of would-be jaw-dropping scenes spoiled by the film’s trailers. We spend the first half-hour awaiting the grand zombie-in-moonlight revelation, which is a little dull when it finally arrives. The crew looks more like an ill-conceived keg party of Crypt Keepers, though the macabre CGI animation does sometimes wow.
But the most annoying aspect of Pirates has to be Depp, who assumes the obnoxious mannerisms of a drunken British dandy, a comic effect that wears thin long before the rum runs out. Even his costuming, with heavy black eyeliner and braided black dreads, betrays the character; he looks more like a lost member of Poison than a devilish buccaneer.
Your standard Disney fare typically pits an orphan or two against one major vainglorious villain, but this time, the orphan (Will) and distressed damsel face a whole fleet of baddies, as well as shady dealings from so-called cohorts. It’s all part of an ill-defined theme about honor and personal responsibility. Even the “evil” pirates follow a murky code of ethics, which only makes sense when it’s convenient to the plot. What it does is allow Disney to have it both ways, playing pirates as both scoundrels and also admirable anti-heroes, with no consistent distinction drawn between the two.
The less cynical viewer might regard this film with smiling nostalgia, given that it was “inspired” by the longstanding ride from Disney’s theme parks. But anyone with any iota of marketing savvy can spot more disturbing intentions underneath. The executive board meeting that made this movie possible is all too easy to imagine, as monkey-suited MBAs decided to retrofit amusement park rides with film products. Thus we get The Country Bears or the forthcoming The Haunted Mansion (no, that’s not a joke), which are little more than brash experiments in profiteering.
Hints of the ride itself do show up in Pirates, though only hard-core Disney followers will spot them. Also be on the lookout for a few oblique references to other Mouse products, such as when Sparrow mentions a “little mermaid.”
At one point in Pirates of the Caribbean, a character describing the cunning crew of the Black Pearl says: “They feel nothing ... they’re driven only by greed, and nothing can satiate their desire.”
The same indictment, it seems, could apply to the Disney execs themselves, modern-day pirates whose gluttony should give every child nightmares.