We get his perspective again when, from where he’s lying, we see a cannonball has taken a giant chunk out of the hull. Jack is in the brig, as per usual, and he only has a little chip in the wood to observe. Sometimes it’s done to keep us invested in a scene, as when we see the battle between the Interceptor and the Black Pearl. It’s a little risky to give us so much insight into the movie’s avowed man of mystery (you know, the one who escaped from a deserted island by, finger quotes, harnessing sea turtles with his back hair), but it also keeps Jack from being a cipher.
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#Pirates of the caribbean the curse of the black pearl 2003 movie
The movie lets us in on Jack’s point of view with some frequency, often in understated ways but with outsize effect. Depp’s Jack Sparrow, whose body language is that of a man who just got a killer massage (and whose mental process is that same man when he remembers he has no money to pay for it), was irony in a magnificent package.
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Culturally, I think we were searching for a little irony. This movie isn’t going to be a straight-arrow pirate flick, and if it had been I think post-9/11 audiences would have scorned it. This is an immensely bold choice for Curse of the Black Pearl, but it of course pays off massive dividends. It’s not until a few moments later that we remember that this is still a pirate in the body of Ed Wood, and we quickly discover that he’s alone on a rapidly sinking little boat. In two seconds, we can make the guess that this pirate possesses the brain of Peter Blood and the motivations of Edward Teach. Depp is not lit badly in some dark hold, scarred and filthy he looks like he could shanghai Olivia de Havilland with a wink and a half-smile. It looks, upon first impression, like the Depp character is going to favor the latter. There are two pirates in pop culture: there is Blackbeard, the hideous buccaneer monster with death in his hands, and there is Captain Blood, who is charming and intelligent and, honestly, more maritime than piratical. His eyes are locked on some point in the distance. He is impassive, even though the wind is obliterating his long hair. He stands atop his mast, the flag waving. This is sunset now, with all of its sexy implications. Think about that first scene with Jack, where we see him first from behind on a sunny day, maybe a little before noon we turn to face him and the colors have changed. The brilliance of Curse of the Black Pearl, a genius which is reportedly Depp’s doing, is its refusal to turn Captain Jack Sparrow into Errol Flynn (or, reportedly, Burt Lancaster, who I have gushed about time and again in this space and who would have been a disastrous model for this movie). Curse of the Black Pearl is not innocent of that incessant ebb and flow – how many times does Jack need to be imprisoned before the shine wears off? – but there’s enough novelty in it, and Depp is so surprisingly engaging, that I’m inclined to forgive it for being a little bloated with its own permutations. The four sequels to Curse of the Black Pearl could have been made by assigning character names to the elements of a pinball machine and charting where the ball strikes. To people like us, those images are at least a little tarnished from overuse. It’s very possibly the look on his face when he turns up the corners of his mustache for Knightley on the beach. Maybe it’s him looking at his weird compass in the middle of a raging storm. Maybe it’s the image of him from all the commercials, where he’s got his pistol on his shoulder, turns his head back that shoulder, and smiles real big.
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(The debate over which line of this movie will take the place of “Damn you all to hell!” has been over for a decade: “But why is the rum gone?”) Maybe it’s the first image of Depp, atop a ship with the sun behind him in a very different time of day the one we see him come into port with. The disadvantage Pirates has in this scenario is that instead of relying on the Statue of Liberty, the most famous image of Curse of the Black Pearl is Johnny Depp doing something Jack Sparrow. I don’t know if this presupposes that forty years from now we’ll see some new adaptation of the Pirates series which has cameos from Knightley and Bloom and callbacks to “parlay” and “poppet,” but it wouldn’t surprise me.
![pirates of the caribbean the curse of the black pearl 2003 pirates of the caribbean the curse of the black pearl 2003](http://www.impawards.com/2003/posters/pirates_of_the_caribbean_ver8.jpg)
I think the best case scenario for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is Planet of the Apes, a high-concept special effects gonzo which is lost to the popular imagination by now – muddled, surely, by many sequels and unconscionably funny Simpsons gags – but whose strongest images are indelible. Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando BloomĬertainly they won’t love it like the people who grew up with it do, but I’m not sure future generations will even remember Curse of the Black Pearl.