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.