Psycho's Movie Reviews #421: Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a 2006 American fantasy swashbuckler film. It is the second instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series and the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). It was directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. In the film, the wedding of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) is interrupted by Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), who wants Turner to acquire the compass of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in a bid to find the Dead Man's Chest. Sparrow discovers his debt to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is due.

Two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl were conceived in 2004, with Elliott and Rossio developing a story arc that would span both films. Filming took place from February to September 2005 in Palos Verdes, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, and The Bahamas, as well as on sets constructed at Walt Disney Studios. It was shot back-to-back with the third film of the series, At World's End (2007).

Dead Man's Chest was released in the United States on July 7, 2006, and received mixed reviews, as the film received praise for its special effects, direction, action sequences, Hans Zimmer's musical score, humour, and performances, particularly those of Depp and Nighy, but criticism for its running time and plot. The film broke several records at the time, including the opening-weekend record in the United States with $136 million, the fastest film to gross over $1 billion at the worldwide box office (63 days), became the highest-grossing film of 2006, and was the highest-grossing film distributed by Disney until it was surpassed by Toy Story 3 in 2010. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and won Best Visual Effects.

Plot

The wedding of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann is halted when Lord Cutler Beckett, chairman of the East India Trading Company, arrives with arrest warrants for them, and also for Commodore James Norrington, who allowed Captain Jack Sparrow to escape. Norrington has resigned and disappeared after losing the Navy's flagship, HMS Dauntless, in a hurricane while pursuing Jack. Meanwhile, Jack is visited by Will's father, Bootstrap Bill Turner, aboard the Black Pearl. Bootstrap is a crewman on the Flying Dutchman, captained by Davy Jones. Jack previously bartered a deal with Jones to raise the Pearl from the depths, and must now join the Dutchman's crew or be dragged to Davy Jones' Locker by the Kraken. Meanwhile, Beckett promises to free Elizabeth if Will brings him Jack's magical compass which points to whatever the holder wants most.

Will finds Jack and the crew on an island and frees them from cannibals. After escaping the cannibals, Jack and the crew visit voodoo priestess, Tia Dalma, who reveals Jones' weakness is his heart, locked within the Dead Man's Chest; Jack intends to find it and free himself from Jones' service. Locating the Dutchman, Will makes a deal with Jack to find the key to the chest in return for Jack's compass but is tricked into joining Jones' crew in Jack's stead. Jones agrees to release Jack from their bargain in exchange for ninety-nine more souls. Will meets his father aboard the Dutchman and learns that Jones possesses the key to the chest. Despite losing a game of Liar's Dice to Jones, Will escapes with the key and is taken aboard the same ship Elizabeth was on. Jones sends the Kraken after him and sinks the ship, but Will again escapes.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth's father Governor Swann frees her from jail but is captured himself. Elizabeth bargains with Beckett to find the compass herself and makes her way to Tortuga, where she finds both Jack and a drunken Norrington. Jack hires a new crew, including Elizabeth and Norrington, and Elizabeth uses the compass to find the chest. All parties arrive on Isla Cruces, where the chest is buried, but a three-way sword fight breaks out between Jack, Will, and Norrington, who all want the heart for their respective goals: Jack wants to call off the Kraken and negate his debt to Jones; Will wants to release his father from the Dutchman; and Norrington wants to regain his life as a Navy officer. In the chaos, Norrington secretly steals the heart and runs off, pretending to lure away the Dutchman's crew. Jones attacks the Pearl with the Kraken, which kills most of the crew and destroys all but one of the Pearl's lifeboats, but Jack, who briefly fled the battle, returns and wounds the Kraken with a net full of gunpowder and rum.

Jack orders the survivors to abandon ship, but Elizabeth, realizing the Kraken only wants Jack, tricks him and chains him to the mast so that the crew can escape. The Kraken drags Jack and the Pearl to Davy Jones' Locker, but Jones opens the chest and discovers his heart is gone. In Port Royal, Norrington gives Beckett the heart and the Letters of Marque meant for Jack, allowing him back into the navy as well as allowing Beckett to gain control of Davy Jones and the seas. The Pearl's crew takes shelter with Tia Dalma, where they all agree to rescue Jack. Tia Dalma introduces the captain who will guide them: the resurrected Hector Barbossa.

In a post-credits scene, the cannibalistic tribe worships the prison dog instead of Jack.

Production

Development

Following the success of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), the cast and crew signed on for two more sequels to be shot back-to-back, a practical decision on Disney's part to allow more time with the same cast and crew. Writer Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio decided not to make the sequels new adventures featuring the same characters, as with the Indiana Jones and James Bond series, but to retroactively turn The Curse of the Black Pearl into the first of a trilogy. They wanted to explore the reality of what would happen after Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann's embrace at the end of the first film, and initially considered the Fountain of Youth as the plot device. They settled on introducing Davy Jones, the Flying Dutchman and the Kraken. They also introduced the fictional East India Trading Company, who for them represented a counterpoint to the themes of personal freedom represented by pirates.

Planning began in June 2004, and production was much larger than The Curse of the Black Pearl, which was only shot on location in St. Vincent. This time, the sequels would require fully working ships, with a working Black Pearl built over the body of an oil tanker in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. By November, the script was still unfinished as the writers did not want director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to compromise what they had written, so Verbinski worked with James Byrkit to storyboard major sequences without need of a script, while Elliott and Rossio wrote a "preparatory" script for the crew to use before they finished the script they were happy with. By January 2005, with rising costs and no script, Disney executives threatened to cancel the film, but changed their minds. The writers would accompany the crew on location, feeling that the lateness of their rewrites would improve the spontaneity of the cast's performances.

Filming

Principal photography began on February 28, 2005, in Palos Verdes, beginning with Elizabeth's ruined wedding day. For Cutler Beckett's introduction, Rossio and Elliott had him arrive on shore in a boat while sitting on a horse stained in the boat; the duo had originally planned to use this introduction for Don Rafael Montero in The Mask of Zorro (1998), but the scene was cut for being deemed too expensive. Similarly, the Pirates crew wanted to cut the idea for budget reasons, in addition to feel that it would be unbelievable, or as the film's historian dismissed, suicidal. However, Verbinksi promised Rossio and Elliott to use the idea and the scene was filmed one day after weeks of planning and training. The crew spent the first shooting days at Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles, including the interiors of the Black Pearl and the Edinburgh Trader which Elizabeth stows away on, before moving to St. Vincent to shoot the scenes in Port Royal and Tortuga. Sets from the previous film were reused, having survived three hurricanes, although the main pier had to be rebuilt as it had collapsed in November. The crew had four tall ships at their disposal to populate the backgrounds, which were painted differently on each side for economy. One of the ships used was the replica of HMS Bounty used in the 1962 film adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty.

On April 18, 2005, the crew began shooting at Dominica, a location Verbinski had selected as he felt it fitted the sense of remoteness he was looking for. However, this was also a problem; the Dominican government were completely unprepared for the scale of a Hollywood production, as while the 500-strong crew occupying around 90% of the roads on the island they had trouble moving around on the underdeveloped surfaces. The weather also alternated between torrential rainstorms and hot temperatures, the latter of which was made worse for the cast who had to wear period clothing. At Dominica, the sequences involving Pelegosto (Cannibal Island) and the forest segment of the battle on Isla Cruces were shot. Verbinski preferred to use practical props for the giant wheel and bone cage sequences, feeling long close-up shots would help further suspend the audience's disbelief. Dominica was also used for Tia Dalma's shack. Filming on the island concluded on May 26, 2005.

The crew moved to a small island in the Bahamas called White Cay for the beginning and end of the Isla Cruces battle, before production took a break until August, where in Los Angeles the interiors of the Flying Dutchman were shot. On September 18, 2005, the crew moved to Grand Bahama Island to shoot ship exteriors, including the working Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman. Filming there was a tumultuous period, starting with the fact that the tank had not actually been finished. The hurricane season caused many pauses in shooting, and Hurricane Wilma damaged many of the accessways and pumps, though no one was hurt nor were any of the ships destroyed. Principal photography was completed on September 10, 2005.

Visual Effects

The Flying Dutchman's crew members were originally conceived by writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio as ghosts, but Gore Verbinski disliked this and designed them as physical creatures. Their hierarchy is reflected by how mutated they were: newcomers had low level infections which resemble rosacea, while veterans had full-blown undersea creature attributes. Verbinski wanted to keep them realistic, rejecting a character with a turtle shell, and the animators watched various David Attenborough documentaries to study the movement of sea anemones and mussels. All of the crew are computer-generated, with the exception of Stellan Skarsgård, who played "Bootstrap" Bill Turner. Initially his prosthetics would be augmented with CGI but that was abandoned. Skarsgård spent four hours in the make-up chair and was dubbed "Bouillabaisse" on set.

Captain Davy Jones had originally been designed with chin growths, before the designers made the move to full-blown tentacles; the skin of the character incorporates the texture of a coffee-stained Styrofoam cup among other elements. To portray Jones on set, Bill Nighy wore a motion capture tracksuit that meant the animators at Industrial Light & Magic did not have to reshoot the scene in the studio without him or on the motion capture stage. Nighy wore make-up around his eyes and mouth to splice into the computer-generated shots, but the images of his eyes and mouth were not used. Nighy only wore a prosthetic once, with blue-coloured tentacles for when Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) steals the key to the Dead Man's Chest from under his "beard" as he sleeps. To create the CGI version of the character, the model was closely based on a full-body scan of Nighy, with Jones reflecting his high cheekbones. Animators studied every frame of Nighy's performance: the actor himself had blessed them by making his performance more quirky than expected, providing endless fun for them. His performance also meant new controls had to be stored. Finally, Jones' tentacles are mostly a simulation, though at times they were hand-animated when they act as limbs for the character.

The Kraken was difficult to animate as it had no real-life reference, until animation director Hal Hickel instructed the crew to watch King Kong vs. Godzilla which featured a live octopus crawling over miniatures. On the set, two pipes filled with 30,000 pounds (14,000 kg) of cement were used to crash and split the Edinburgh Trader: Completing the illusion are miniature masts and falling stuntmen shot on a bluescreen stage. The scene where the Kraken spits at Jack Sparrow does not use computer-generated spit: it was real slime thrown at Johnny Depp.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest premiered at Disneyland in California on June 24, 2006. It was the first Disney film to use the new computer-generated Walt Disney Pictures production logo, which took a year for the studio to design. Weta Digital was responsible for the logo's final animated rendering and Mark Mancina was hired to score a new composition of "When You Wish Upon a Star". The main people responsible for the logo's rendering are Cyrese Parrish and Cameron Smith.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 53% based on 229 reviews, with an average rating of 6.00/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Gone is Depp's unpredictability and much of the humour and originality of the first movie." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film received an average score of 53 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "mixed to average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A–" on an A+ to F scale.

Michael Booth of the Denver Post gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "two hours and 20 minutes of escapism that once again makes the movies safe for guilt-free fun." Drew McWeeny compared the film to The Empire Strikes Back, and also acclaimed its darkness in its depiction of the crew of the Flying Dutchman and its cliff-hanger. The completely computer-generated Davy Jones turned out to be so realistic that some reviewers mistakenly identified Nighy as wearing prosthetic makeup.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "You put down your money – still less than $10 in most cities – and in return you get two and a half hours of spirited swashbuckling, and Gore Verbinski has an appropriate sense of mischief, as a well as a gift, nearly equalling those of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, for integrating CGI seamlessly into his cinematic compositions." Empire magazine gave the film 3 stars saying "Depp is once again an unmitigated joy as Captain Sparrow, delivering another eye-darting, word-slurring turn with some wonderful slapstick flourishes. Indeed, Rossio and Elliot smartly exploit these in some wonderful action set-pieces." "We don't get the predictable 'all friends together on the same quest' structure, and there's a surfeit of surprises, crosses and double-crosses and cheeky character beats which stay true to the original's anti-heroic sense of fun. After all, Jack Sparrow is a pirate, a bad guy in a hero's hat, a man driven by self-gain over concern for the greater good, who will run away from a fight and cheat his 'friends' without a second's thought."

Paul Arendt of the BBC compared it to The Matrix Reloaded, as a complex film that merely led onto the next film. Richard George felt a "better construct of Dead Man's Chest and At World's End would have been to take 90 minutes of Chest, mix it with all of End and then cut that film in two." Alex Billington felt the third film "almost makes the second film in the series obsolete or dulls it down enough that we can accept it in our trilogy DVD collections without ever watching it." Mark Kermode of The Observer accused the film of "lumpen direction, lousy writing and pouting performances", but wrote that "the worst thing about Dead Man's Chest is its interminable length. The entire Pirates of the Caribbean franchise may be a horrible indicator of the decline of narrative cinema."

Dead Man's Chest earned $423,315,812 in North America and $642,863,913 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $1,066,179,725. Worldwide, it ranks as the 15th highest-grossing film distributed by Disney, the highest-grossing film of 2006, the third highest-grossing film of the 2000s, and the highest-grossing film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. It was the third film in history to reach the $1 billion mark worldwide, and it reached the mark in record time (63 days), a record that has since been surpassed by many films, of which the first was Avatar (in January 2010).

In North America, the film broke many records including the largest opening- and single-day gross ($55.8 million), the biggest opening-weekend gross ($135.6 million), the least time to reach $100, $200 and $300 million and the highest ten-day gross. However, most of them were broken by Spider-Man 3 in May 2007 and The Dark Knight in July 2008. The film was in first place at the box office for three consecutive weekends. It closed in theaters on December 7, 2006, with a $423.3 million haul. Thus, in North America, it is the seventeenth-highest-grossing film, although, adjusted for inflation, the film ranks forty-eight. It is also the highest-grossing 2006 film, the highest-grossing Pirates of the Caribbean film, and the seventh-highest-grossing Disney film. The film sold an estimated 64,628,400 tickets in the US.

Outside North America, it is the twenty-first-highest-grossing film, the third-highest-grossing Pirates film, the eighth-highest-grossing Disney film and the highest-grossing film of 2006. It set opening-weekend records in Russia and the CIS, Ukraine, Finland, Malaysia, Singapore, Greece and Italy. It was on top of the box office outside North America for 9 consecutive weekends and 10 in total. It was the highest-grossing film of 2006 in Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden and Thailand.

Budget $225 million

Box office $1.066 billion

My Review

More, more, more seems to be the theme running through Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. There's more adventure, more violence, more pirates, and more myth. Not to mention that two and a half hour running length. But while Superman Returns may have dragged some in its 150 minutes, Pirates hurtles along at a pace only expected from the offspring of a Disneyland theme-ride, rarely slowing for piddling bits of nonsense like, oh say, story. Of course, story's not the point of these flicks and it surely doesn't have to be. There's entertainment enough to be had without all the other hodgepodge. And Pirates 2, for all its expansion, manages to dodge common sequelitis pitfalls. It doesn't overdose on a memorable character from the original (cough, Matrix Revolutions, cough) or over-broaden it's scope (cough, Matrix Reloaded,cough). Dead Man's Chest is a continuation of the original Pirates adventure, just with a couple extra unmarked sails tacked onto its deck.

The plot has something to do with ole' Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, of course) and his debt to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). Debts, as we've all learned by now, are not things Mr. Sparrow is most proficient at repaying. The Dead Man's Chest factors in as it holds Mr. Jones' beating heart, which was ravaged by the likes of a lady whom he loved in the past. The English Navy blowhards also seem to be after the chest, and blackmail William Turner (Orlando Bloom) to seek out Capt. Jack's magic compass, which supposedly points toward the treasure. Held in a cell is Will's fiancé, Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightley), under charges of assisting Capt. Jack in the franchise's last swashbuckler. What it boils down to is a mottled mess of a chase to find the key to Davey Jones' chest, and avoiding his gargantuan beast, the Kraken.

The myth itself wrings deeper than the original's, with Davey Jones and his seafood cohorts rendered with an unholy amount of CGI goodness to make them squirm convincingly in all their scaly, slippery evil. But the plot doesn't hold much water, same as the first, though plot was never the point. As long as it paints a tastily mythological backdrop for our pirates to plunder, we're kept smiling. And even though the picture has all the weight of a paperclip, the franchise has at least matured since it's last time around. The mood has thickened and no longer can we tell that the film is a shameless translation of its Disneyland ride. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio take efforts to develop each of our three heroes separately, using individual sub-plots to fill in the otherwise empty moulds left dry from the original. Will Turner has a family reunion with his father (Stellan Skarsgard), enslaved by Davy Jones and appearing as though he's slowly evolving into a starfish. Will's fiancé, Ms. Swan, escapes from her cell and hides as a stowaway on a trade vessel. And Jack, of course still functioning as the star of the show, develops his slimier persona with delectable cowardice and deception. Ironic that the teenagers of America have chosen Mr. Sparrow as their most prized character in film. Oh, wait, that honour instead belongs to Napoleon Dynamite. Perhaps we should be nervous about our country's future?

Anyway, along with the characters the adventure is also thickened heartily; though probably not by consequence of the writing, but instead because of the greatly inflated budget. Our friends are volleyed about the seas, facing the enormous sea monster, the Kraken, whose plunger-like tentacles crumple vessels like copy-paper. Swordplay is more indulgent too, with Verbinksi going so far as to mount a chivalric swordfight inside a huge, rolling waterwheel as it bounces along the island's foliage. Verbinski juggles these stunts with ease, proving once again his film-making versatility. If you'll remember all the way back to last October (I know, in Hollywood-time nine months is an epoch) Verbinski made a quiet, gloomy little character study called The Weather Man. And before that, Verbinski also directed The Ring and Captain Jack's first adventure in 2003. Yup, this guy's the real deal. In the waterwheel sequence, Verbinski chooses not to succumb to any mere CGI trickery, and mounts a camera on the wheel's axis to show that at one point he forced Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom to swordfight on a giant spinning wooden wheel. And he's more artistic than your typical Brett Ratner-esquire director, finding a visual aesthetic perfect for a pirate's tale.

But art and pretentious critic fodder aside, Dead Man's Chest is great entertainment. It's rich and exciting and chock-full of Captain Jack-isms for high schoolers to repeat over and again. And the life of pirates is still a chunk of history that Hollywood has been unwilling to bite into for a while. Pirates of the Caribbean, for all its feathery, lightweight fun, gorges on this chunk and keeps us hooked on the adventure, waiting along with all the local eighth and ninth graders next year for the midnight showing of Captain Jack's trilogy capper. 9.5/10