Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) Review
8/10
It was adapted from a ride. The pirate genre had been considered dead since Cutthroat Island lost enough money to bankrupt a studio in 1995, and Disney was making a film out of an attraction with animatronics.
Everything about the project was a bad idea and the result is one of the best adventure films of its decade, which happened largely because of one performance the studio spent the shoot trying to modify.
Gore Verbinski directed, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wrote it, and it made over six hundred and fifty million dollars against a budget of around one hundred and forty.
The 8 is for a genuinely well-built adventure picture with a functioning plot, real stakes and an antagonist with a comprehensible curse. It runs about twenty minutes long, the middle has one too many double-crosses, and the sequels retroactively damage it. On its own it holds up completely.
The Performance the Studio Objected To
Depp played Jack Sparrow as unreliable, effeminate, apparently drunk and never quite in command, based on his own account on Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew.
Disney executives reportedly believed he was sabotaging the film and asked repeatedly whether the character could be played straighter. Depp has said he told them they could fire him and he was not changing it.
What makes it work is that Sparrow is not the hero. He is a complication in somebody else’s story, with his own agenda, who helps for reasons that are never quite altruistic and frequently turn out to be self-serving.
That is a much better use of a charismatic performance than putting it at the center. The film has a straight protagonist in Will Turner, a proper romantic lead in Elizabeth, and lets Sparrow be weather.
Every scene he is in is improved by the fact that nobody, including the audience, can predict what he will do. That unpredictability only has value because the surrounding plot is reliable.
He was nominated for an Academy Award, which for a Disney adventure film was close to unheard of, and it is a deserved nomination instead of a novelty one.
A scene-stealing character should not be given the protagonist’s role, and the temptation to promote them is almost irresistible because they are the most fun to write. Sparrow works because the plot does not depend on him being reliable, which is exactly what the sequels forgot.
The mechanism is that unpredictability requires a stable frame. If everybody in your story is unreliable, nothing is unexpected, and the reader has no baseline against which to measure the chaotic character. Will Turner is dull on purpose, and his dullness is what makes Sparrow legible.
The test is to ask whether your plot would still function if your most entertaining character behaved badly at every turn. If it would collapse, they are load-bearing and you have made them unpredictable and essential at once, which is a contradiction. Keep the entertaining one slightly outside the structure and give the structural work to somebody less interesting.
The Curse Has Rules
The cursed crew cannot die, cannot taste food, cannot feel wind or water, and cannot be satisfied by anything they steal. They are visible as skeletons in moonlight and as men otherwise.
That is a genuinely good antagonist motivation because it is comprehensible and sympathetic while remaining an obstacle. Barbossa is not evil. He is desperate, and Rush plays it with total commitment and no winking.
The rules are also consistent throughout, which matters enormously in a fantasy adventure. Moonlight reveals them. The medallion and blood are the mechanism. Both requirements are established early and neither is fudged at the climax.
The apple is the detail that sells it. Barbossa wants to taste an apple, says so, and carries one, and that single object does more to establish the curse’s cruelty than any amount of exposition.
The fight in the cave, where the skeletal crew and the living navy exchange blows in and out of moonlight, is a set piece built entirely from a rule the audience already understands.
The curse also gives the film its ending. Breaking it requires the crew to become mortal, which means winning and losing are the same action.
Why the Genre Had Died
Cutthroat Island in 1995 lost so much money that it contributed directly to the bankruptcy of Carolco Pictures, and the industry concluded that pirates were finished.
That conclusion was about one film’s execution instead of the genre, which is a mistake studios make with remarkable consistency. A category is declared dead because a bad example of it failed.
Eight years later the same material made over six hundred and fifty million dollars, and the only variable that changed was that the new one was good.
The same pattern has run with westerns, musicals, sword and sandal pictures and space opera. Each was declared finished after a failure and each returned when somebody made a good one.
What is instructive is how confident the conclusions are. Nobody in 1996 said Cutthroat Island was badly made; they said audiences did not want pirates, which was a considerably larger claim on considerably less evidence.
Disney also had almost no confidence in this film. The expectation internally was reportedly modest and the marketing was cautious.
The industry habit of declaring categories dead is worth understanding because publishing does exactly the same thing, and it is usually wrong in the same way. A failed book in a category becomes evidence that the category has no readers.
The mechanism of the error is that a failure has one visible attribute, its genre, and a great many invisible ones: pacing, casting, marketing, timing, competence. Attributing the outcome to the visible attribute is easier than diagnosing the invisible ones, so that is what gets attributed.
The practical implication is that a genre everybody says is finished is frequently the best available opportunity, because the field is empty and the audience has not gone anywhere. The test is to ask whether the last failure in your category was bad or merely in that category. If it was bad, the conclusion drawn from it is worthless and you should proceed.
The Sequels Damage It
Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End are considerably more expensive, longer, more incoherent, and they promote Sparrow to the center, which is the one thing the first film knew not to do.
They also abandon the rules. The first film’s curse is precise and consistent. The sequels have a heart in a box, a locker, a goddess, a compass with variable properties and multiple sets of supernatural rules that interact unpredictably.
That is the usual path. A first film establishes constraints and succeeds, and the sequels read the success as being about the elements instead of the constraints, so they add more elements.
Will and Elizabeth become progressively less interesting as Sparrow becomes more central, because the film no longer has anybody reliable for him to be unreliable against.
On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales continue the decline, and by the fifth the character is a collection of tics performing a role that no longer has a story to complicate.
None of this affects the first film if you watch it alone, and it is worth doing so deliberately, without the accumulated memory of what followed.
Elizabeth Swann Is Better Than She Is Remembered
Keira Knightley was eighteen and the character is considerably more active than the sequels and the general memory of the film suggest.
She reads the curse before anybody else does. She invokes parley correctly because she has studied pirate law. She burns the rum to create a signal fire, negotiates her own release, and stabs Barbossa with full knowledge that it will not work, to make a point.
The film also gives her a real position. She finds the medallion as a child, conceals its origin for a decade to protect Will, and every consequence in the plot descends from that childhood decision. She is the reason the story exists.
What she is not given is a fight, which is where the modern instinct would go, and the film is better for it. Her competence is social and intellectual and it is what the plot really requires.
The scene where she is dining with Barbossa, dressed by him, being observed, and is entirely aware of what is being staged and playing along until she can act, is the best writing she gets and one of the film’s best scenes.
The sequels give her a sword and a captaincy and progressively less to think about, which is the usual trade and a bad one.
Competence is not a single quality and choosing the wrong kind for your character will weaken them while appearing to strengthen them. Elizabeth is intelligent, informed and socially adept in a story about negotiation, alliances and rules, which means her abilities are the ones the plot needs.
Giving her combat skill instead would have been a downgrade disguised as strength, because the plot has no shortage of people who can fight and a shortage of people who understand the situation. Her value is that she has read about pirates and everybody else is improvising.
The test is to identify what your story is really about at the level of activity, then check that your characters’ strengths operate in that domain. A story about a siege needs somebody who understands logistics. A story about an inheritance needs somebody who understands the family. Handing every capable character the same generic competence is how ensembles become interchangeable.
Should you watch Pirates of the Caribbean?
Yes, and watch only the first one. It is twenty minutes too long and it is a properly constructed adventure film with consistent rules, a sympathetic antagonist and one of the great comic performances. Do not continue to the sequels and if you already have, watch this one again on its own and see how tight it is.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists