Released 7 July 2006
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Kevin McNally, Stellan Skargard, Tom Hollander, Naomie Harris, David Bailie, David Schofield
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images.
151 minutes
Estimated Production Cost: $225 million
Domestic Box Office Gross: $423.3 million
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $1.066 billion
Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, Winner of 1
- Best Visual Effects (won)
- Best Sound Editing (nominated; lost to LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA)
- Best Sound Mixing (nominated; lost to DREAMGIRLS)
- Best Art Direction (nominated; lost to PAN'S LABYRINTH)
$1 BILLION
In the way most trilogy second parts tend to be, DEAD MAN'S CHEST is a placeholder, a second act without the sense of discovery to a beginning or the satisfying destination of a finale, so it really makes particularly little sense to run two and a half hours, but produced in the wake of the immensely successful Lord of the Rings trilogy (the second chapter of which was itself a clean three full hours), studios had become inclined to let their blockbusters run a fair bit longer for the moment. Following the unprecedented success of the first POTC film, which gave Disney their first taste of 21st-century blockbuster event-sized box office, they took a page out of Warner Brothers' book. After the success of THE MATRIX in 1999, a $63 million sci-fi action-thriller that grossed $463.5 million worldwide, Warner gave the Wachowski's and Joel Silver a combined budget of $300 million to do it two more times and turn it into a trilogy, resulting in $1.116 billion gross shared between the two Matrix sequels. So when the $140 million (a sum that required a continuously impassioned defense from producer Jerry Bruckheimer against the protestations of notoriously tight-fisted oversight of CEO Michael Eisner) PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL hauled in $654.2 million at the worldwide box office, Disney chucked a colossal $450 million budget back to see what two sequels would do for them. Even with that absurd amount of money, Bruckheimer and returning director Gore Verbinski managed to go well over budget (making an epic action-fantasy-horror-romance period piece set at sea is expensive!), but to their credit, the sequels made more than enough money to make the investment worth it.
DEAD MAN'S CHEST wasn't just a big blockbuster. It was a phenomenon. Nowadays, $1 billion worldwide is the standard goal of every mega-blockbuster, and by mega-blockbuster, I mean the five or so really big brand-name movies that open each year. They call it the "billion dollar club", and there are 29 of them to date, the most recent being the 2017 live-action remake of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Two billion-dollar movies, JURASSIC PARK and STAR WARS: EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE, got close in their original releases, but it took grosses from their 2013 and 2012 3D re-releases, respectively, to get over the mark. But billion-dollar grosses only recently became regular occurrence. The first movie to cross $1 billion was James Cameron's 1997 romantic epic TITANIC, which stood as the highest-grossing movie of all time for 12 years. The second time it happened was Peter Jackson's 2003 fantasy epic THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING. When it happened the third time with DEAD MAN'S CHEST in 2006, there still wasn't a billion dollar club. A billion dollars was still just a number that made box office analysts go, "Holy shit, what's happening here?" Back in 2006, when there were only three movies that had ever grossed $1 billion, it was like grossing $2 billion, which, coincidentally, only three movies to date have done (AVATAR, TITANIC and STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS).
Given the choice between making stand-alone adventures a la the Indiana Jones series or retroactively making the first film into the first part of an overarching trilogy, writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio made the weird choice of the latter. The first movie was a big and brash, jaunty summer blockbuster without mythic ambitions or any suggestion of being more than an appropriately thrilling ride, and I used to think, for as much as I still liked the POTC sequels, that the trilogy idea was a misstep and they should have stuck with a stand-alone adventures model. I've changed my mind since. It's interesting going back and rewatching the first installment, then seeing how what had been throwaway lines or one-off plot points are expanded, although in the case of DEAD MAN'S CHEST, the trilogy formula does render it into a placeholder. You could take DEAD MAN'S CHEST and smash together with AT WORLD'S END, remove a couple of hours, and you'd have a much more efficient and nonetheless cracking pirate epic. That said, those couple of hours have a lot in them.
Out of the POTC trilogy directed by Gore Verbinski, DEAD MAN'S CHEST is the weakest, subjected to the typical problems of a second act, specifically that it's clearly a placeholder, and a bloated one at that. To be fair, all the POTC movies are bloated, but DEAD MAN'S CHEST feels it the most. At 151 minutes, it's about ten minutes longer than THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, although 15 minutes shorter than the third installment, AT WORLD'S END. Let's be clear, all of these movies are too long. I mean, when I'm at home, and there's no commitment to stay in the same seat and watch the movie with no breaks, plus time to drive to the theater and back, runtime is a minor thing, but when I'm planning on going to the theater, and I look at the runtime and see 140 minutes, thought instinctive response is, "Aw, f*** you." But there are a lot of really long-ass movies that I really, really love, such as the 168-minute third movie in the series. I just wish they'd stop making them that long now. Like, 2 hours is really good, 130 minutes if you really, really must, but longer than that just seems rude. Anyway, the thing about DEAD MAN'S CHEST though, is that it's almost all set-up for the climactic chapter, and when it ends, it's jarring. It's a movie without a clear sense of destination or specific purpose in terms of narrative, particularly evident in something like the Cannibal Island scenes, which are fun and unique, but also which make up a healthy portion of the film without contributing significantly to the story and characters as a whole. The DVD commentary recorded by screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who were present throughout filming and writing DEAD MAN'S CHEST and AT WORLD'S END as they went along without a finished script) is interesting and a little bit sad, because they spend so much time trying to justify decisions and respond to plot criticisms, and a lot of their explaining is about things that actually make a lot of sense, but they explain the Cannibal Island section of the movie as a way of showing that Jack is forced to be at sea (where he's hunted by Davy Jones's Kraken) because he isn't safe on land either, and there must be a simpler way to do that. And yet, it's still fun and unique, and that's ultimately what makes all of DEAD MAN'S CHEST worthwhile, even if when all is said and done, it's mostly filler. Film critic A.O. Scott of the New York Times summed it up thusly: "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..." If that's not what summer entertainment is about, then I don't know what is. Two hours, though. Two hours would be plenty enough, guys.
The Kraken is the vision of a Ray Harryhausen movie monster realized with modern technology and hundreds of millions of dollars to play with, and the result is utterly fantastic. Actually, the Kraken destroys three ships over the course of the movie (and another off-screen, which Will Turner finds with a sailor's face literally suctioned off), but one is merely a tease, building up to the monster's big reveal. When the Kraken destroys the Edinburgh Trader, an ill-fated merchant ship and crew that finds itself in the pathways of both Elizabeth and Will, we get the full Kraken treatment, and it truly makes a mess of things. Hans Zimmer's score of pipe organs and synthesizers blares and pounds while giant tentacles flail wildly, snatching up screaming sailors, splashing saltwater and snapping the mast. It's fantastic, spectacular and a bit horrifying, all culminating in a straight-up insane finish. How do you destroy an entire ship for a movie? Do you snap an entire ship just for a movie? Is it feasible? Maybe you just smash up a model or do it all in the computer. Or, if you're Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski with $225 million to spend out on the open ocean, you fill a couple of huge pipes with 30,000 tons of cement each, dangle them over your full-sized ship with a crane, and then you drop them. On the ship. Filmed from multiple angles, you drop a collective 60,000 tons of cement on the middle of a sailing ship, which will crush it right in half in a spray of splinters, and later, you go into the computer and replace those pipes with a couple of CGI tentacles. You know, break a full-size goddamn ship in half like a couple of madmen. Holy. Crap. How's that for blockbuster entertainment? Also, on just one of those smaller details, I love all the splashing water that rains down from the tentacles during those Kraken attacks. It's a great effect that adds so much, and I swear, you can feel it.
With THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, the crew had to fight for a PG-13 rating, and it became the first movie released with the Disney logo with a rating harsher than PG. For DEAD MAN'S CHEST, the rating was a given, and Gore Verbinski takes full advantage of that, giving us a scene of gibbeted prisoners getting their eyeballs plucked out by crows early on, just in case any parents with small children wandered in under false expectations. Being the second movie in the series, the cliché is that it has to be the "Empire Strikes Back of the series", and clichéd or not, that's what it is. This movie is darker and more violent, with nastier villains, but also nastier heroes. Moving beyond the standard swashbuckling battles with the occasional squishy/crunchy stabbing sound, we are now bombarded by lengthy and intense scenes of sailors terrorized, thrown about, and implicitly devoured by the monstrous Kraken while the decks are strewn about with bodies, blood and splinters (a good cringe-y moment of a man's legs broken as he's dragged through a porthole), a fish man's stomach sliced open and the contents gushing out onto the deck, and a sailor's slit throat gushing blood before his body is unceremoniously dumped overboard. All the movies contain elements of horror, but being the "dark" movie in the series, DEAD MAN'S CHEST is where Verbinski most gets in touch with the genre of THE RING. You even get a body with its face sucked-off, which is a cool and creepy image, but it also doesn't entirely make sense and confused me the first time I saw it. The front of his head is still covered with skin, but it's all been warped and twisted with an eyeball in there somewhere, like a cartoon version of someone without a face. But, you know, why not? Rated PG-13 for "intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images," it also as a bloody, beating, anatomically-correct heart as the McGuffin. Gotta love that.
Bill Nighy's Davy Jones is fantastic. Just fantastic. Obviously Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow is the crown jewel of this series as far as characters/performances go, that's a given, but picking a second is practically impossible to do. I'd argue that Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Swann evolves to point in AT WORLD'S END that puts her in the running, but Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa is a perfect version of the stereotypical pirate for modern audiences (complimenting Depp's more original, oddball take), and then there's Davy Jones. Like Depp, Nighy's performance is strange and otherworldly, and not just because his physical appearance has been painted over with a digital beard of tentacles. DEAD MAN'S CHEST is the only movie in the series to have won an Academy Award, that being for visual effects (the first movie was also nominated, but that was the same year as THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING, so that made sense, but when AT WORLD'S END was nominated, the Academy gave it to THE GOLDEN COMPASS like a bunch of ass-hats), and it was a massive step forward in the process of performance-capture (aka motion-capture, or mo-cap) filmmaking. STAR WARS: EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE played around with performance-capture technology in creating Jar Jar Binks, but since most people hated that character, it wasn't until Gollum/Sméagol in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that the technology to translate a human actor's performance into the computer and muscle movements of a digital character caught on. DEAD MAN'S CHEST was the first time that mo-cap characters were simply filmed on location with everything else (typically, they would film the scene on location with the performance-capture actor for reference, then they'd film the scene without the actor, and then the actual performance would be filmed in the controlled environment of a soundstage, which is what they did for the skeleton crew in the first movie), and unlike Depp or the rest of the main cast, Nighy didn't have the benefit of a cool pirate costume to help him get into character. If you've ever seen behind the scenes photos or footage of Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman crew before the effects are added in, it's just odd and kind of sad. You have this beautiful, gritty-looking Flying Dutchman set with all the details, barnacle-encrusted and dangling seaweed, and then there are the actors standing around in ridiculous-looking grey long underwear, complete with caps and dots stuck to their faces. Nighy has green, scaly-looking makeup around his eyes and mouth, an insurance policy in case the digital artists were unable to replicate the eyes and mouth movements convincingly (as in the case of the fully motion capture feature film THE POLAR EXPRESS, where the characters look like dead bodies being moved around on strings like marionettes), but that route never became necessary. I remember reading the review of the movie by Jeff Vice in the Deseret News (I'm embarrassed to admit that during my young, immature, and much more stupid years I insulted him via e-mail in response to his negative review of AT WORLD'S END, but it was also a good learning experience for me, so there), where he complimented the "makeup", and apparently he wasn't the only one to make that mistake, but I remember thinking, "Uh, no, that's CGI. I'm certain that's CGI." That's not to say it looks like CGI, but that just made more sense (to be clear, there's a lot of stuff in these movies that you might assume is all digital out of economic necessity but is actually practical). The visual effects are that good, and they hold up perfectly. I remember seeing the trailer for DEAD MAN'S CHEST ahead of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE in December 2005 (I was aware of upcoming POTC movies, but not of any of the specifics, and the preview was a very pleasant surprise), beginning with a voiceover: "You have a debt to pay. You owe Davy Jones your soul. That was the agreement..." Then you get this chilling shot of a man stepping heavily down the stairs below a ship's deck in a storm, but this man has a big lobster claw instead of a hand, encrusted with barnacles all over, a big dark hat in the shape of a devil's horns, and most of all, a face warped with a beard of slimy octopus-like tentacles. "Time's up. You're a marked man, Jack Sparrow." I knew dick about Cthulu at the time, but holy cow, he looks fantastic.
The visual aspects of Jones are incredible, but there's a performance to match from Nighy, an English character stage and screen actor who'd been active since the early '80s, but it was only in the early 2000s that he started to show up as a prominent character actor in comedic roles as the bacchanalian aging rock star Billy Mack in LOVE, ACTUALLY in 2003 and as the title character's distant stepfather in SHAUN OF THE DEAD in 2004, as well as in horror as the villainous vampire Viktor in 2003's UNDERWORLD. In POTC, Nighy brings both and with a lot of pathos as a villain who is deeply cruel because of life's cruelty to him, but who also has a weird degree of quirkiness and offbeat mannerisms that give him a lot of personality. Since he's the captain of the Flying Dutchman (a mythical ghost ship of sailor lore that signals impending doom), the natural way to go would be a Dutch accent, but Nighy wasn't sure how to do that, and I guess it wasn't important enough to try accent training, so he just went with a somewhat Scottish accent, but a tad different, and just a little nasally (given the character's lack of nose). Anyway, he's totally emo and relatable to what I assume are most young men (and women, for that matter) in that he was hurt so deeply by love that he cut open his chest, removed his physical beating heart and placed inside a different kind of chest, one with lock and key. The pain of unrequited love is an ideal motivation for this Gothic horror-styled villain, and like most people at such painful times, Davy Jones just wants to be alone with his music, but even that he does in an awesome way. Nighy's Jones is a "man", as it were, who relishes his own power and cruelty, using words in order to milk pain and sadness from others and buttoning those lines with a weird little "blup" smack of his lips, just thirsting for that anguish.
Johnny Depp gets an awful lot of credit for these movies, but while he deserves the lion's share of credit for creating the character that is Jack Sparrow, Gore Verbinski obviously brings the overarching vision as the director with input and oversight from the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are the ones figuring out how to use the ideas inside a story and putting words in the mouths of characters, just to name four integral members of the main creative team. Another is Mark "Crash" McCreery, a former protégé of animatronic and practical effects icon Stan Winston who specializes in creature and concept designs. McCreery's credits include all four Jurassic Park films and the design of Danny DeVito's Penguin makeup in BATMAN RETURNS, and starting with the 1997 dark comedy MOUSEHUNT, he's been a recurring collaborator with Verbinski. After the cursed crew of skeletons in the first movie, Bruckheimer believed a sequel needed something in a similar vein, and the initial idea of Davy Jones's crew was that they'd be ghosts, but as Lord of the Rings demonstrated, swordfighting a ghost hardly seems fair (they've got ghosts in the upcoming fifth film, so we'll see how that goes, but they look cool). You've got to at least be able to chop parts off or something like that, so McCreery and his team of designers came up with a bunch of different nautical mutations for the crewmen who are bound to the ship and gradually morph into amalgamations of sea creatures over their years of service, eventually losing their memories and personalities and being absorbed into the crusty, mossy structure of the ship. Let's be honest; skeleton pirates are still more cool than fish-man pirates, and I was a little bothered by the chaotic incoherence of a lot of the designs the first time I watched it. The hammerhead shark guy was fine, because he's mostly a hammerhead shark guy, even with a few lengthy crab legs poking out his back, but most of them are dripping masses of goopy seaweed, slime, coral and barnacles. I've since come to appreciate them for what they are. I'm not sure what's up with the little shrimp guy though. He's little and he never talks. He just hops around.
When news broke of the imminent POTC sequel, the big point I remember being made was that Will Turner's dad would be in this one, a character who is talked about in several scenes of first movie but who never appears onscreen and it's sort of implied is dead. Of course, he can't be dead, because Bootstrap Bill Turner was cursed the same as the rest of the undead crew of the Black Pearl, and that's the whole reason they needed his blood (Will's blood) to lift the curse. So as far as they know, he's been languishing on the floor of the ocean strapped to a cannon for the last eight years until Will ends the curse at the end of THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, presumably suddenly allowing poor, lonely Bill to finally drown down there. In terms of the first movie, it's pretty weird that this was never addressed, but there is a deleted scene for DEAD MAN''S CHEST where Will confesses to dealing with the guilt of presumably killing his father, but by that point, if the audience is really paying attention, it's a given.
FILLING IN THE BLANKS
One of the most popular criticisms of the POTC sequels is that they become overly complicated, which I never found was the case, but I think, in a way similar to what Star Wars does at its best, the stories are lined with arguably unnecessary but enriching details. It's a lot of "2+2=x" and the audience puts two and two together. One such detail that I love but is only on-screen for a moment is the discovery of the titular Dead Man's Chest, the lock box that Davy Jones stored away his heart in and buried in the beach sands of Isla Cruces. The island of Isla Cruces, Spanish for "Island of the Cross", has a story behind it, one that leaves a few details in the finished film, but the specifics of which were left on the cutting room floor. It's an uninhabited island that used to be inhabited by native peoples before missionaries arrived and built a church, but also brought disease that killed off the population and left it the ideal and feared plague island for Jones to bury the chest in. One of the deleted scenes included Elizabeth telling the legend of how on priest was left alive, and after he'd buried the others, he hanged himself, then later, during the three-way swordfight in the church bell tower, the camera would momentarily linger on the decayed corpse of that priest still hanging there (in the finished film, you can still catch a couple glimpses of the corpse's legs and the noose). But even without all that, you know that the island is the Island of the Cross, it's apparently uninhabited, and the only signs of human civilization are an abandoned church and a graveyard with unfinished graves. The chest is a beautiful design by people you just know grew up obsessing over the Ark of the Covenant in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. It's small and distinct, with tentacles and crustacean ornamentation, with the notable heart-shaped crab lock (similar to Jones' heart-shaped crab music box) with legs that expand with jutting out pegs along the lid when unlocked, and you get the sense that it's on the heavy side. When Jack first uncovers it, it's inside of a larger, more basic box, and inside that box with the chest are a lot of letters and other trinkets, things that are just passed over as Jack takes out the chest, but remain as a small reminder of what Davy Jones locked away with his heart, the things that were too important but too painful. You don't have to say anything about them. It's all just there to spark your imagination further.
These sequels began filming without finished scripts, which is usually not a good idea, although sometimes you'll get something great from that improvisation, for instance, IRON MAN and, at least I'd argue, POTC 2 and 3. It's interesting though, listening to the DVD commentary with screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, to hear them talk about all these plot points that they could have made clearer and trying to defend the movie from criticisms as if it didn't make a billion dollars and wasn't pretty good besides. The deleted scenes for DEAD MAN'S CHEST that have been released are full of attempts to unnecessarily clarify things further, and some of it's interesting, but really you really don't need all that, and for some reason, Elliott and Rossio are weirdly confident in the importance of the cannibal island stuff in the plot. I mean, yeah, it's fun, but really? It's an awful lot of movie for a little justification.
All the major characters in DEAD MAN'S CHEST are morally ambiguous at best and downright nasty at worst, except perhaps for Elizabeth, who is mostly horny. Seriously though, I remember seeing a banner ad for it online shortly ahead of its release that said something along the lines of "Captain Jack has 3 days to get 99 souls" and thinking that my mom wouldn't like that. In the context of the movie, it's mostly clear that Jack makes the deal to get 99 souls for Davy Jones as a stalling tactic rather than with a true intention of selling 99 souls into damnation, but then he also goes to Tortuga to recruit as many wastrels as he can but only manages to get 5. Jack's "honest streak" that set him apart from unethical pirates in the first movie is in tumult this time as he faces imminent damnation in Davy Jones's Locker, and he'd rather be free than a hero, but ultimately, it's the honest streak that gets the better of him and leaves him on the Black Pearl for the Kraken to take. In one of his darker moves, Jack more or less tricks Will into service aboard the Flying Dutchman, but to be fair, Will figures the situation out pretty quick, and Jack was compartmentalizing and planned on getting Will out of it as soon as he got the chest. So was it wrong? Yes, but not as wrong as selling your friend's soul to the Devil without any exit strategies. The "heroes" of this movie do attribute surprisingly little value to life, though. Even the ultra noble nice guy from the first movie, the guy who accepted defeat in love with grace and dignity, James Norrington, is now an alcoholic wreck who double-crosses everyone for self gain. Will is still a pretty decent guy for most of the movie, although he does inadvertently bring about the deaths of everyone on the Edinburgh Trader after hitching a ride with the Kraken in pursuit, and he's about as ungracious and self-serving as the other parties in the three-way swordfight. Elizabeth is a really peculiar case though, being a generally sensible and decent character, but also with her biggest motivation coming from her lust, which I'm not sure is feminist or not. It's different, that's for sure. Sword practice is used as an innuendo in these movies from time to time, whether its Jack teasing Will about practicing swordplay for three hours a day and how he "needs to get [himself] a girl" or Will teaching Elizabeth swordplay everyday during the time in between THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL and DEAD MAN'S CHEST, and when Elizabeth tells Jack "I'm so ready to be married," it isn't the ceremony that she's talking about. And as horny as she is, she's got a little bit going toward the bad boy Jack as well, which is one of the more controversial aspects of this installment, but which also builds to the necessary betrayal at the end when she kisses him all the way into handcuffs.
TOP TEN BEST STUFF ABOUT PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
10. TOE NECKLACE - I think it's pretty self-explanatory. It's a necklace made out of severed toes strung together, and Jack Sparrow chews the nail of one. What's not to love?
9. HELLO, BEASTIE - Jack's big hero moment/hero shot, which he naturally has to be tricked into via what I once heard described as a "near-pornographic kiss", with the gradual appearance of the Kraken's full jaws on the side of the ship, the nasty Kraken slime (which came with the Jack Sparrow action figure, by the way), Jack big, unbuttoned shirt sword-swinging moment diving into its jaws, and the shot of the full ship being taken down in a writhing mass of tentacles through Jones's spyglass. I'm gonna lump Jones's opening of the chest and spitting out "Damn you, Jack Sparrow!" while his crew goes spastic around him in there too, because I love it.
8. "TIME'S RUN OUT, JACK" - Jack Sparrow goes down to the rum stores of the Black Pearl to get another bottle, spots some mussels eerily attached to woodwork, pulls the bottle out and sand pours from it like an hour glass. It's that Gothic horror streak in these movies, and Jack's meeting with Bootstrap Bill is a Marley's Ghost sort of moment.
7. LIAR'S DICE - I bought this game, complete with the plastic replications of waterlogged and barnacled leather dice cups, and it's awesome. I mostly use it for decorative purposes now. The scene as it was originally written is weird because it was twice as long and Will played against Jones twice. The first time, he plays for his father's freedom and wins the game, accomplishing a little too easily what will become Will's objective for the remainder of this film and the next, but there's some good repartee between Will and Jones about love, desperation and women and how "the right woman need not make you desperate." The scene in the finished film is just the second half of that original full scene, but it's better in this shortened form. I don't know, I even like a good poker game scene in a movie even if I have no idea how the game is played, but with liar's dice, I actually do get it. It's a fun scene of suspense from a different source.
6. DAVY JONES'S SALES PITCH - The clunking sound of his peg-like crab leg hitting the deck as he comes aboard the wrecked ship, Davy Jones lights his pipe with his face tentacles and begins, "Do you fear death? Do you fear that dark abyss? All your deeds laid bare [snorts]? All your sins punished? I can offer you...an escape." A bloodied sailor with a rosary interjects boldly and quickly has his throat slashed and body thrown overboard. "Life is cruel!" Jones tells the others, rapping his pipe against his claw to shake out the ash, "Why should the afterlife be any different? I offer you a choice; join my crew and postpone the judgment. One hundred years before the mast. Will ye serve?"
5. THREE-WAY SWORDPLAY - It's the only full-on swordfight in the film (there's a bit of swordplay in the Tortuga brawl sequence, but that's just a small element of a big free-for-all), but it makes up for that in scale and balls-to-the-wall zaniness, and the subversion of the usual gender roles in this kind of action is great when the fight begins and Will tells Elizabeth to guard the chest, a command that's followed by an incredulous "No!" It goes from the beach to the church ruins, and onto a waterwheel that breaks off and rolls away with increasing speed with combatants struggling to keep up in and around the spinning environment. My favorite stuff is in the church, particularly the silhouetted shots of them standing atop the crumbling church walls.
3. WRECK OF THE EDINBURGH TRADER - I love both major Kraken sequences, but there's something about the sheer spectacle and brevity of the mid-movie action scene in which the Kraken destroys the Edinburgh Trader in Jones's attempt to kill Will and punish Bootstrap. I always forget how quick it is. It starts with the captain pulled off deck and then lifted up through the water, and suddenly it erupts into a melee; you get the pipe organ and electronic sounds of Zimmer's Kraken theme as people are picked up randomly and thrown about violently, it snaps the mast, and then it crushes the ship through the middle in a spectacular blend of oversized practical destruction and CGI tentacles. It's dark and sort of poetic, a disproportionate punishment for the Edinburgh's crime of first-time off-the-books trading.
2. DAVY JONES THEME SEQUENCE & INTRO OF THE FLYING DUTCHMAN - The scene beginning with the pipe organ over the Flying Dutchman rolling on a stormy sea, showing Will along with the varied fishy members of Jones' crew working on the ship while Jones plays his own theme aggressively on organ. The music is awesome, and I particularly like the dripping and spurts of steam from the organ.
1. DAVY JONES - A spectacular villain for the two-film sequel arc; spectacular in visual design, with his beard of tentacles, an oversized crustacean claw, a crustacean limb "peg leg", and devil horns hat; and spectacular in performance, with Bill Nighy's weird and over-the-top tics and offbeat speech. The effects still hold up, and I love his final scene with the opening of the chest, the low bells of Zimmer's score, and spitting water as he shouts, "Damn you, Jack Sparrow!"
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