Whatever Happened to Pirates of the Caribbean?

This started out, in the planning stages as another of the ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ series, but then it got to Friday and I realized I hadn’t written anything, so I needed something that I could put together quicker.

So instead we’re talking about Pirates of the Caribbean because the soundtrack keeps popping up on my Pandora.

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Whatever Happened to Pirates of the Caribbean?

It’s hard to believe that Pirates of the Caribbean used to be one of the biggest movie serieses of all time. Seriously--it was the movie that everyone parodied, remembered the lines from, and watched with their friends. It was huge. And now it’s just… not. It continues to baffle me, in the same way that everyone used to love The Matrix and would lovingly compare it to Star Wars and Harry Potter as a pop culture story.

And the obvious answer is that the sequels were bad. Which is true! Even if you liked any of the sequels, as I did, the fact remains that none of them were as good as the original. But the second and third movies try to paint the series into a saga, and it… clearly isn’t one? The Plot kind of wanders around, and then neatly finishes, and then a sequel happens mostly unrelated to the previous saga, and then…

...I don’t want to talk about the fifth movie. It’s just bad.

The first film is fantastic: great acting, great story, great characters, great action--just great all around. It has some of the best sword fights you’ll ever see in a movie, without any of the annoying quick camera cuts that plague modern action movies. The characters are all likable and interesting people. The humor is actually funny and surprising when you see it for the first time. It’s just a darn good movie.

What made the second and third movie not work with audiences is the fact that they’re not very well planned. This isn’t opinion, by the way, it’s documented--the second and third films were in pro-production for longer than Disney wanted, so Disney basically told the makers to either start making the darn movie or they’ll pull funding. And so they announced they’d start filming, even though they didn’t have a finished script. What they did have were storyboards--ideas for set pieces and scenes and how they wanted those scenes to go and what they would look like. Which is why those two films have big dumb scenes that don’t seem to go anywhere or really make sense when you think about them--like the three-way sword fight on the water wheel, or the final battle between the Flying Dutchman and the Black Pearl.

The Plot doesn’t really make sense. The whole thing in Dead Man’s Chest is that they’re looking for the Dead Man’s Chest to threaten Davy Jones with, and possibly kill him. And yet in the next film we’re told that the person who kills Davy Jones has to replace him. Which you would think is something that the characters would need to know in the last movie, in which everyone’s out to get it.

And people didn’t like it! They also didn’t get it--especially At World’s End, which has so many double-crosses and a hard-to-follow plot that the DVD actually comes with an FAQ to answer all the lingering questions that audiences had.  So even though they made money, word-of-mouth wasn’t great and there wasn’t really a rush to make another. It was in the works immediately, of course, but it took a while.

And it didn’t really learn from the mistakes of the past ones? See, part of the problem was that Captain Jack Sparrow proved to be an insanely popular character, and but he’s an antihero. So he works best in a supporting role. But all the sequels saw that people loved him and decided to center the story entirely on him. Of course this leads to convoluted films with no real hero character, and since his development is, at best, slow there’s not much to get invested in his character. He’s not a character that’s dynamic as much as a way to get witty dialogue and cool scenes. Which isn’t bad for comedies, but it isn’t a great way to build a long-running character-driven adventure series: around a character who doesn’t develop much. He’s a comedy character in a story that’s not a comedy, and centering on him doesn’t work.

It also probably didn’t help that the Plots of the different movies had trouble distinguishing themselves. Generally there’s an evil McGuffin of some sort everyone’s after, and the bad guys are an evil captain and a cursed undead crew. The one sort-of exception to this is On Stranger Tides, in which Jack becomes an unwilling part of the villain’s crew, who are mostly not terrible people, and only a handful of crewmembers are undead. But it’s still there, and it’s overstayed its welcome by then.

Which is a shame because the premise of ‘Pirate story with some fantasy elements inspired by old maritime myths and no strict adherence to real world history’ is a fantastic one for a movie series. There’s so much that they can do with these stories; they don’t even need to all be about the same characters. And yet they’re all amounting to the same basic formula of ‘Go get the McGuffin before the undead evil bad guys do.’

This should have been the fantasy series of our time and now it’s… well, it’s not. Nobody talks about it much anymore. It’s sad. I mean it’s especially sad if you’ve watched Dead Men Tell No Tales, which was just painful to sit through. I wish we could turn back the clock on the series, but it’s a bit late. Supposedly plans for a reboot are being kicked around, but I don’t think that’ll ever recapture the magic of the original film, or be half as fun. I could be proven wrong of course, and I would love to be.

But I suspect Pirates of the Caribbean has had its day.

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