Category: Pirates of the Caribbean

We Pillage, We Plunder, We Rifle, and Loot

Oooo boy is there a lot of information in this movie. But each piece of information is simple, straightforward, and always pays off. Plus we have Will and Elizabeth to be baffled and confused so the other characters can tell the audience what everyone else already knows. Most importantly though, the backstory is always used to build suspense.

But I Have Seen a Ship with Black Sails

Mullroy and Murtogg – the comic relief British soldiers – provide the simple setup (or planting :3) for the Black Pearl: It’s an evil, haunted ship crewed by the damned. Boom! One sentence! The conversation doesn’t feel like an info dump because, well, it actually sounds like two old friends arguing, and it makes us curious – is the Pearl actually haunted? How is it haunted? What’s going on here?

When the Pearl shows up in Port Royal, the man in the jail cell next to Jack Sparrow hands out the reminder: The Pearl leaves no survivors. During the battle there are two visual hints that something’s off. A pirate goes down when Will throws an axe into his back, but later the pirate reappears (Will looks confused so we know something’s up). Several pirates find Jack in his cell and when one of them grabs Jack by the throat, his hand turns to bone. Jack even says, “So there is a curse. That’s interesting.” Whaaaaaat? Curiosity peaked. (This is a mini-payoff, btw.)

The mystery of the Pearl is our point of tension for the first half an hour of the movie. But its backstory is also integral to the plot, so it can’t be dragged on too long. Peak interest comes at about the 45 minute mark when Barbossa tells Elizabeth about the curse and the pirate gold.* The mystery of the Pearl is payed off in a satisfying way and will now provide suspense as a point of danger to our heroes. At this point our attention has also been turned to Will’s last name and that becomes our point of tension and suspense.**

*Barbossa mentions that the moonlight shows them for what they really are: namely skeletons. This is set-up visually by the many shots of the moon being covered and exposed by clouds.

**In addition, Jack’s relationship to the Pearl has been woven into the opening. He knows its guns, he knows the crew and calls them mutineers, and he’s the first person to bring up the Pearl in the movie. But! Jack’s backstory has only been mentioned briefly because the opening would be too cluttered with that information and we don’t need it yet. Instead Gibbs explains it about an hour in.

Named for your Father, Eh?

I talked about Will Turner’s arc in my first Pirates post (now lost unfortunately), so here I’ll just cover the beats that emphasize the importance of the name Turner.

When Elizabeth gives her surname as Turner (nicely setup when her maid suggests the pirates are here to kidnap her aka the governor’s daughter), the moment has weight because Barbossa repeats the name to his crew and one of the pirates gives the name ‘Bootstrap.’ Who is Bootstrap?

When Will later asks Jack to help him, Jack only agrees when he learns Will’s name – as Will himself points out later. Again we linger a moment and Jack asks if Will’s named for his father. (This is also when Will explains that he can open the cell with the proper leverage – since Will is later Jack’s leverage this is a bit of a clunky metaphor, but it does manage to come off naturally in the film, so I’ll give it a pass.)

Like the backstory of the Pearl, the mystery of Will’s ancestry isn’t the point of the story, so the important bits are explained at about the 50 minute mark, just 5-10 minutes after it’s first mentioned. But! There’s still tension because we don’t know why Jack wants Turner.

In the next scene we learn Jack wants Will for leverage so that Barbossa will give him the Pearl. This must be convincing because a very dubious Gibbs buys into it. But why does Barbossa want Will? The scene after that Barbossa explains to Elizabeth that they need Turner blood to break their curse – plus the full backstory of how the Pearl and its crew got cursed.

At this point, about an hour in, pretty much all of our questions are answered. The suspense is now no longer based on mystery, but Jack’s constant backstabbing and the danger to Elizabeth and Will.

Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho!

And Really Bad Eggs

There are so many through-lines in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The fact that every single one of them pays off and doesn’t feel contrived is stupid. (Everything from Gibbs’ leather flask being loaded into a canon only for Jack to find it later to Mullroy and Murtogg’s banter about whether Jack is telling the truth, which is reference a magic number of 3 times, to Elizabeth giving her name as Turner, which of course allows for the mistaken identities, but is also used to develop her and Will’s romance when he asks her why she used his name, suggesting that she’s fond of the idea of having his surname *gasp* *pant*.) I’ve talked about the big suspense-building plots – like the Black Pearl’s curse. These are smaller, you know, apple-sized instead of ship-sized

No Additional Shots Nor Powder

Balancing your protagonist’s physical resources and skill against your antagonist’s physical resources and skills is crazy difficult. At the beginning your protagonist should be at a disadvantage so at the end it feels like their victory is hard-won. Often this victory is with a final deus ex machina/power move, like the appearance of a new weapon in Pacific Rim, or by the protagonist learning to hit harder, like in the final fight between Harry Potter and Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.

Another option is to straight-up give the protagonist less weapons. Often this comes in the form of a few dozen heroes against a million enemies à la most Avengers movies. But once you get past like 50 the number’s are really too big for us to comprehend. This is good for scale, but not for detail and intimacy. When Butch and Sundance face off against an entire army in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we have a solid sense of the numbers: two men against a few dozen soldiers. As very briefly mentioned in Mikey’s video about Mad Max: Fury Road, this is all the more powerful when the protagonist’s weapons are carefully and clearly presented to the audience so we know exactly what our heroes are working with and can watch them slowly run out of ammo.

In Pirates, after Commodore Norrington catches Jack Sparrow, he, very organically, sorts through Jack’s affects. Norrington comments on the affects and the camera deliberately lingers on each. Jack has one sword, one gun, one bullet, one compass. No additional shots nor powder. The sword of course is an unlimited resource, but almost everyone else is fighting with a gun, so that puts him at a stark disadvantage. (Now you might be asking, aren’t Will and Elizabeth are protagonists? What about them? Well their disadvantage comes mostly from them not being ruthless and chaotic enough. They’re not pirates. But ultimately while Barbossa is everyone’s antagonist, he’s really Jack’s antagonist.)

Even though Jack threatens to use his one bullet multiple times, it’s very clear he doesn’t want to. When he pulls the gun on Will at the end of their first fight, he says, “This bullet was not meant for you.” Will gives us his starry-eyed confused face so that we wonder, Who is it meant for?

From there the gun is never forgotten and has its own merry journey:

1. Jack threatens a soldier on the Dauntless with the gun.
2. Gibbs explains how Barbossa marooned Jack and left him with one shot and that Jack won’t use it save on one man: Barbossa.
3. Will threatens to shoot himself with it if Barbossa doesn’t let Elizabeth go.
4. Jack and Elizabeth are marooned with only Jack’s gun. Barbossa suggests Jack use it, but when Jack does pull it on Elizabeth after she burns the rum, it’s played as a joke because at this point we know Jack would never waste it on something like this.
5. Jack shoots Barbossa.

Nom, Nom, Delicious Apples

It would have been so easy to muddle through Barbossa’s motivations (that all-important WANT). The screenwriter even could have left the motivation monochromatic across the whole crew: get the gold, feel stuffs again. They even could have left ‘feel stuffs’ as sex/women/wine (vaguely, of course, this is still Disney). It’s not very original, but they’re pirates. That does in fact appear to be the crew’s motivation. They paw at Elizabeth quite a bit and when Barbossa says, “You know the first thing I’m gonna do after the curse is lifted,” everyone chuckles suggestively.

But the screenwriter doesn’t do that. Instead Barbossa has a specific and deeply human desire: all he wants is to eat an apple again. It’s small, sure, but it’s powerful and creates a vulnerable crack in Barbossa’s armor.

When Elizabeth eats dinner with Barbossa, she ravenously devours the banquet, until her offers her a green apple. Unfortunately the camera-work makes it a somewhat sexual moment, but I think Geoffrey Rush means to play it as a very powerful man who is struggling not to look desperate and pathetic by the simple act of watching someone eat while knowing he can’t. Elizabeth refuses the apple and so we get a sort of refusal of his humanity.

Later what Barbossa says that suggestive, “You know the first thing I’m gonna do after the curse is lifted,” he turns to Elizabeth and adds, “eat a whole bushel of apples.” How much more interesting and telling that desire is!

Jack later picks through Barbossa’s apples and we get a quick shot of Barbossa being bitter as Jack blithely, mockingly eats the apples. Jack even offers him one, just to rub salt in the wound.

When Jack finally does shoot Barbossa, Barbossa says, “I feel…” and we see the momentary joy of him being alive and part of the world once more, only for him to realize what he feels is pain and finality as he says, “cold.” As he falls, an apple tumbles from his hand. Now, where did he get that apple? Wasn’t he just holding a gun? Or weren’t his hands empty? WHO CARES IT LOOKS COOL AS ALL GET-OUT AND WORKS ON A SYMBOLIC LEVEL. In other words, he has regained his humanity, only to lose it irrevocably (no, the other movies don’t count, stop it.)

Footnote: the bright-green apples are a great color contrast to the generally blue and red color palette.

The Blood of a Pirate

Blood is a MOTIF, if you will. Or symbolism if you won’t. The blood is both physical and symbolic and is very tied up with the imagery of the medallions and thus the imagery of a curse.

At a symbolic level blood is ancestry, specifically the idea that piracy runs in Will’s veins because of his father Bootstrap. It’s never said this way, but Will initially sees his association to Bootstrap as a curse. Bootstrap is a pirate, the thing that Will hates most. Will is branded and haunted and used because of his blood. Only when he accepts his piratical origins, reveals it to others, and then finally cuts his own hand is he able to accept his blood.

Despite, you know, pirates, the physical blood is very sparing in this movie. Which means it stands out all the more. There are four key moments with blood and they all relate to the curse.

1. The first blood is drawn by Elizabeth when she stabs Barbossa in an attempt to escape after he’s explained the curse and threatened to kill her. The baroque image of him removing the bloody knife from his chest is ghastly and intimidating and I love it.
2. Barbossa returns the favor when he cuts Elizabeth’s palm over the medallions, believing her blood will break the curse. There are later threats to spill all of Will’s blood to ensure the curse is broken.
3. Jack and Will cut their palms in order to break the curse right as…
4. Jack shoots Barbossa. Barbossa opens his shirt as blood spills from the wound over his heart. We begin with the bright, ghastly and almost unreal blood of the undead and end with a dark, spilling river of heart’s blood that is only possibly because it brings Barbossa’s life to an end.

Also just the red blood on the brusque gold medallions, it’s just such a good color.

The Code

Can we just talk about the pirate code for a sec? Just because it’s a weird contrivance that shouldn’t have worked. At a meta-level it’s a set of in-universe rules that allows the screenwriters to get around sticky situations – like why wouldn’t the pirates kill Jack/Elizabeth upon seeing them? And why would Gibbs abandon Jack? Technically this is bad screenwriting, but it works not only because everyone buys into it, but the screenwriter is absolutely not above making fun of how ridiculous the code is.

More importantly though, it ties into Elizabeth and Will’s arc. In the end this is a story about Elizabeth and Will learning to break the rules. So when Elizabeth says to Gibbs and the pirate crew, “You’re pirates. Hang the code and hang the rules. They’re more like guidelines anyway,” it’s really the culmination of her arc. And, you know, she got ‘they’re more like guidelines’ from Barbossa, so it’s an acceptance of piracy at its fullest and most volatile.

Anyway this is all to say, Guys, this is such a good movie. You should go watch it again.