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 among the best adventure films of its decade. That 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.
I have a ridiculous amount of fun with this one, and nearly all of it comes from how straight everybody else plays it around Depp. I’d cut twenty minutes and at least one double-cross, and I think the sequels did it real harm, but the first film on its own is a pleasure from the first moonlight reveal to the end.
The 8 is for a 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 wasn’t changing it.
What makes it work is that Sparrow 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’s 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.
That nobody, including the audience, can predict what he’ll do improves every scene he’s in. 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’s a deserved nomination instead of a novelty one. Depp is the reason the rating sits this high. Every line reading lands slightly off the beat, and I’m delighted the studio lost that argument. Played straight, Sparrow would have been one more swashbuckler in a hat, and I doubt anybody would remember the film.
A scene-stealing character shouldn’t be given the protagonist’s role, and the temptation to promote them is almost irresistible because they’re the most fun to write. Sparrow works because the plot doesn’t depend on him being reliable. That’s 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 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’re structural and you’ve made them unpredictable and essential at once.
That’s 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 can’t die, can’t taste food, can’t feel wind or water, and nothing they steal can satisfy them. They’re visible as skeletons in moonlight and as men otherwise. That’s a good antagonist motivation because it’s comprehensible and sympathetic while remaining an obstacle. Barbossa is desperate, and Rush plays it with total commitment and no winking. The rules are also consistent throughout. That matters enormously in a fantasy adventure. Moonlight reveals them. The medallion and blood are the mechanism. The film establishes both requirements early and fudges neither 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 apple is my favorite thing in the film. Rush makes Barbossa’s hunger for one piece of fruit so sad that I end up half on his side, and I think that’s what makes him the best villain the series ever had.
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. That 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. That’s a mistake studios make again and again. 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’s instructive is how confident the conclusions are. Nobody in 1996 said Cutthroat Island was badly made; they said audiences didn’t want pirates. That 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 matters because publishing does exactly the same thing, and it’s 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’s 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 hasn’t 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. That’s 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’s 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.
The sequels annoy me more than a plain bad film would, because the blueprint was sitting right there and they threw it away. By the fifth film the character has nothing left to push against, and I blame the people who decided the scene stealer should carry an entire franchise.
None of this affects the first film if you watch it alone, and it’s 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’s studied pirate law. She burns the rum to create a signal fire, negotiates her own release, and stabs Barbossa with full knowledge that it won’t 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’s the reason the story exists.
What she’s not given is a fight, which the modern instinct would reach for, and the film is better without it. Her competence is social and intellectual and it’s what the plot requires.
The scene where she’s dining with Barbossa in a dress he chose, with him watching her, entirely aware of what he’s staging and playing along until she can act, is the best writing she gets and one of the film’s best scenes.
That dinner is where Knightley wins me over. She’s frightened and calculating at the same time, and I’d much sooner watch her outthink Barbossa across a dinner table than watch the sequels hand her a sword.
The sequels give her a sword and a captaincy and progressively less to think about. That’s the usual trade and a bad one.
Competence isn’t 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. That 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’s 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 stop after the first one. It’s a solid 8 for me. I lose patience in the saggy middle, where one double-cross too many piles up, and it’s twenty minutes too long. Everything else works, from the consistent curse to Rush’s sad, hungry Barbossa to Depp’s gloriously unreliable Sparrow. If you’ve already sat through the sequels, come back to this one on its own and see how tight it is.
