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Forgive the groan-worthy pun, but the pirate film genre was dead in the water by this point. Cutthroat Island was the most recent big-budget pirate film, and it was a notorious bomb in 1995. More ominous signs loomed over Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl prior to its release. How exactly does one go about using a theme-park attraction as the basis for the huge summer blockbuster? Is Disney seriously banking this on Johnny Depp and two relatively unknown British actors to lead this?
We were naïve in 2003, in a sense, not that Pirates eventually behemoth box office take and franchise spawns were obvious at the time. But when the final product is so crowd-pleasing and fun, so drunk upon the images and clichés of the pirate genre, its success isn’t quite so astounding in hindsight. Still, none of us saw this franchise coming, nor the eventual decade-plus of continuing sequels (a fifth is planned for 2017). Even better is how well the first one holds up.
Yes, Pirates does overstay its welcome by about thirty minutes of extended double/triple-crosses and fighting, but there’s enough freewheeling, exciting film-making here to power you through. I assume it was Disney’s controlling hand here, but Pirates is a prime example of a formula working very well. The two romantic leads are straight men, Depp gets to play the rogue scene-stealer, while Geoffrey Rush’s villain is gloriously theatrical, and the technical aspects power you to the home stretch.
There’s no narrative surprises or character development that decades of popcorn entertainment haven’t prepared you for, but how well they’re employed it what makes it all work. Orlando Bloom’s Will and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth are our young lovers with a backstory that ties into the central curse/mystery, while also both effectively working as protégé’s to Depp’s unique creation. This is the hero’s journey distilled down as basically as it was in Star Wars, effectively making Depp the Han Solo, Knightley the Leia, and Bloom the Luke.
Bloom’s handsome but bland screen presence allows the other two to shine brighter. He looks like a Douglas Fairbanks, but displays none of the personality or charisma. Knightley exhibits tons of spunk and personality in her role, transitioning from damsel-in-distress to pirate-princess over the course of just this film. (Her character’s transition over the first three is a rare example of female character becoming an action heroine.)
But Pirates is best known for Depp’s career-changing role for a good reason, he gives us a spin on a pirate and charming rogue ally that we’ve never seen before. His character generally wobbles around in a permanent state of inebriation, experiencing rare moments of lucidity and keen-eyed intelligence. This character would eventually devolve into pure caricature in the later films, but the darkness lurking beneath the androgynous pirate make the character. His moments of steely sobriety are bracing for how smartly deployed they are in rare moments.
Pirates may belong to Depp, but he’s not the lone essential performance here. There’s Geoffrey Rush’s hammy, rafter-shaking Barbossa, the rival pirate captain struck with a curse. Rush plays the role with all the verbose artifice of a Charles Laughton. When these two aren’t warring with each other, either verbally or in sword fights, the film finds a way to marry swashbuckling adventure, romance, mild horror (the curse renders a gang of pirates as disturbing zombies), and a quickly unraveling (made-up on the fly) mythology that they try to make feel lived in and authentic to the universe.
There’s a lot going on in this daffy tapestry, and the film cannot hold all of the weight it loads upon its own back. But my god is it fun. Unburdened from history, this would be the point at which Depp’s career began its slow decline and his top-lining a blockbuster would lead to a groan, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is what we go to summer movies for. It’s escapism, heavy on the signs and symbols of pirate lore, and clearly enamored with its sword fights, goofy accents, parrots, secret treasure, and rococo humor.
