Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

From its opening frames of slow motion rain splattering on tea cups and sheet music, as a bereft bride-to-be, Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann, sits haunted, left at the altar, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest demonstrates its confident craft and atmosphere. This is a big-budget blockbuster that excels at the little things, even as it swells the scale of Hollywood action adventure to epic proportions.

Almost 20 years later, Dead Man’s Chest plays as a remarkably classical film in many respects. It emphasizes practical filmmaking elements, such as costumes, sets, and exotic locations. Its story vacillates between goofy slapstick and dour melodrama. In essence, it bridges the gap between swashbuckling adventures from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the modern franchise film, as later defined by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s also the best film in a franchise that went on a little too long.

Calling Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest the best film in the series might seem blasphemy to those many people who find the first film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, to clearly be the best of the series. But despite the standalone charms and rewatchability of the first film, and the mournful ambition of the underrated third film, At World’s End, Dead Man’s Chest is everything a Pirates of the Caribbean film ought to be. It’s fast-paced, inventive, creepy, and a rollicking good time.

The narrative is set-up as a quest, with double-crosses, triple-crosses, and endless chases across the high seas. It turns out that 13 years ago, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow made a bargain with the supernatural pirate captain Davy Jones, trading 100 years of service on the Flying Dutchman in exchange for the captaincy of the Black Pearl for 13 years. The payment has come due, so in order to avoid his fate, Jack seeks to find Davy Jones’ heart, buried in his “dead man’s chest” somewhere in the Caribbean. If he can possess the heart, he can control Jones and escape his fate.

It turns out that everyone in Dead Man’s Chest is attempting to escape their fates in one way or another. In the opening, Elizabeth Swann and Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner are arrested and condemned to hang for rescuing Jack at the end of the previous film. The new head of the East India Trading Company and regional authority, Tom Hollander’s Lord Cutler Beckett, will give them their freedom if Will can obtain Jack’s magical compass, which can lead Beckett to Davy Jones’ heart first.

Will sets out on his quest and eventually finds Jack, who double-crosses him and trades him to Davy Jones to buy him more time to find the chest. Elizabeth escapes captivity and sets out to find Will, while Will meets his father aboard the Flying Dutchman, Stellan Skarsgård’s “Bootstrap” Bill Turner. Will now seeks to win his father’s freedom. Oh, and old nemesis Jack Davenport’s James Norrington is back, having been stripped of his commission by Beckett for letting Jack escape, and also seeks his own redemption by finding the chest first.

This description of the plot of Dead Man’s Chest conveys the bare minimum, but does suggest the busyness of narrative and quests and mythology that threatens to bog down the film in its 150-minute runtime. This swelling of story would become more of an issue in At World’s End, but it’s here in Dead Man’s Chest, treading barely on this side of manageable. It can be hard to keep track of every single character and where they are and what they’re trying to get. Thankfully, the characters are all united in a clarity of motivation: they want their freedom. A life of piracy is presented as the personification of freedom in the first film, and this sequel extends the emphasis by baking it into every single character’s story. Even the villain Davy Jones wants freedom from human suffering. This means that despite the busyness of the plot, there is a clarity of storytelling that many films to come in the wake of Dead Man’s Chest lack.

It also helps that Dead Man’s Chest is rather breathlessly paced. The Curse of the Black Pearl sags during the middle section of the film after the Black Pearl has reached the Isla de Muerta and the narrative has to retrace ground to link up all the characters for the climax. Dead Man’s Chest does not suffer from such sagginess. Part of this is director Gore Verbinski’s talent for balancing the epic with the emotional, large-scale action sequences with smaller character moments that hearten us to the heroes. The film is not 150 minutes of one tone and one storytelling approach. Rather, it varies its approach, sometimes wildly, depending on the scene.

It also relies on a remarkable amount of cinematic tension and atmosphere. Verbinski and writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio spend the early parts of the film building up the mystique of Davy Jones, the crew of the Flying Dutchman, and Jones’s Kraken, and their deliberate parcelling out of these characters and story elements pay enormous dividends. When Bootstrap Bill first shows up to warn Jack that his debt has come due, he’s presented as a drowned pirate with barnacles growing from his skin. He shakes Jack’s hand and gives him the black mark on his flesh, warning him that Jones’s leviathan will track him down no matter where he flees. Bootstrap Bill disappears into the shadows and Jack emerges on deck to tell his crew to make for land, any land.

Jack loses his hat overboard, but doesn’t bother to retrieve it, demonstrating the severity of his panic—he’s rigorous about protecting said hat in the first film. Verbinski doesn’t then cut to the other characters, but follows the hat, which is picked up by a trading vessel. Two sailors bicker over who gets to wear the hat while something cuts deep through the water beneath. There’s a groan and a roar and the surface of the water bursts and the ship is dragged to the depths in its entirety. Verbinski and team are teasing the power of the Kraken, the fearsome nature of Davy Jones, and the severity of the threat facing Jack Sparrow. And it’s tremendously effective.

Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones finally appears one hour into the film and he’s an amazing creation, part brilliant vocal and facial performance by Nighy, part marvel of CGI by Industrial Light & Magic. The film is almost 20 years old, but Jones, with his octopus head and crab arm, remains one of the great computer-generated characters. The quality of the work stands up against most CGI creations of today. The budget of Dead Man’s Chest was famously enormous back in the mid-2000s, and the funds invested continue to pay dividends in how well the visuals have held up.

But it’s not just that the CGI is realistic. It’s that Verbinski and his team of designers and technicians know how to craft a moody atmosphere to support the story. The Flying Dutchman first appears bursting from the depths of the ocean in a canted, low-angle frame, which makes the ship seem as much monster as vessel. Jones’s crew of sea monster pirates are equally fantastic, visually hideous and splendid, more interesting and with more personality than the ghost pirates of the first film. Dead Man’s Chest learns the lessons of the first film and bakes the fantastical elements into the plot, creating a vast mythology that has actual implications on the characters and their world, rather than merely providing a central quest element to be chased and resolved. Compare the Isla de Muerta to the Flying Dutchman for all the proof you need that the fantastical elements of this world improved between films. Now said mythology would swell to near bursting in At World’s End, but it speaks to the film’s ability to create a provocative atmosphere that does as much to tell the story as the plot and characters. It also takes another 30 minutes for the Kraken to finally appear on screen, so they don’t shoot their shot all at once. The film continues to build mystery and tension even as new threats arrive on screen.

It also helps that Verbinski and his crew pack these fantastical elements with eclectic details. Notice how Davy Jones plays an organ or how he smokes a pipe, puffing smoke out of one of his tentacles, in his first appearance. The barnacles and tubules that hide at the appearance of Davy Jones aboard the Flying Dutchman make the world seem vivid and alive. It’s proof of how Dead Man’s Chest borrows from The Empire Strikes Back in more ways than one. The film borrows many narrative elements from the “greatest sequel of all time,” such as its middle-sequel plotting, quest structure that splits up the trio of leads, heightened stakes, and cliffhanger ending from The Empire Strikes Back, but it also expands the storyworld with details and exposition and mythology like that second Star Wars film.

Dead Man’s Chest also shares a love of classical adventure storytelling with Star Wars. The film’s dedication to seafaring adventure, sword fights, monster attacks, and slapstick draws direct references to classical fantasy and adventure films, including the works of Errol Flynn, notably The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, as well as the Ray Harryhausen epics of the 1950s, like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Like those films, Dead Man’s Chest can move swiftly between exciting adventure, detailed sword fighting choreography, and goofy slapstick—often all within a single scene. Take the extended sequence aboard the native island early in Dead Man’s Chest, which is wild and unabashedly dated in its use of classic pirate iconography. Jack’s efforts to escape a native tribe that wants to eat him plays like a silent film, with Jack as Buster Keaton tripping over items and deconstructing his physical environment in order to survive. The entire sequence would work well with its dialogue entirely removed, which demonstrates the strength of the film’s visual storytelling.

Later scenes blend swashbuckling action with slapstick, such as the fight in the bar in Tortuga. As James Norrington and Elizabeth (disguised as a man) fight an angry crowd, the camera weaves its way through the riot, up the stairs, and along the bannister to follow Jack passing through the chaos, swapping one hat for another. The action moves to a rhythm, literally swelling and shifting to Hans Zimmer’s pounding music, pausing for comedic emphasis, climaxing on cue. It’s fun to watch and effortlessly clear, like something out of a classic Errol Flynn film.

The film’s strong choreography climaxes with the wheel fight between Jack, Will, and James Norrington, as they fight for possession of the key to Davy Jones’s chest. The wheel fight stands as a high water mark for sword fighting action in the 21st century, and probably the best sword fighting that isn’t influenced by martial arts cinema, such as in the Star Wars prequels, the Kill Bill films, and Chinese epics like Hero. The wheel fight captures the appeal of Dead Man’s Chest in microcosm. It’s several fights in one, a breathless adventure and a goofy comedy, a feat of digital filmmaking and a clever employment of practical filmmaking techniques.

The wheel fight starts with a Mexican standoff on the white-sand beach and heads into the bush and up the stairs of the ruins of a church. Characters swing on the ropes of the church tower’s bell, fighting as they go up and down, trading possession of the key with each shifting environment. Eventually, Will and James make it onto the top of an old mill wheel while Jack escapes with the key. Jack falls into an open grave in the churchyard, and Will and James cause the wheel to start spinning. They fight on top of it, maintaining balance while the wheel rolls over the open grave, pulling Jack into its spin as the old wood breaks over his head and plucks him up like a cog in the wheel. Will and James balance on the top, trading parries and thrusts, while Jack gets unstuck and starts to run inside the wheel like a hamster.

The scene is all about balance. It’s clear throughout what is going on and where the characters are coming from and heading to. The stakes are clear, as the importance of the key and the chest has been built up for over two hours. The choreography is balanced as each character trades advantages during the fight, and is about actual balance within the physical actions, as the characters struggle to maintain balance aboard the moving wheel. Key shots within the fight involve a camera latched onto the side of the wheel, spinning as the wheel does, showing the reality of the filmmaking, the real sets, real locations, and real stunt performers fighting on this real wheel spinning through an island jungle.

The wheel fight is the dizzying, delightful climax of Dead Man’s Chest, but arguably its most emotionally invigorating moment is the ending. After Jack is eaten by the Kraken and swallowed into Davy Jones’s locker along with the Black Pearl, the other characters mistake his death as a heroic final stand for his friends. Rather, Elizabeth had chained him to the mast of the Pearl, knowing it was their only chance for escaping the Kraken.

So the film ends with the death of the principal character, but one that complicates all the relationships of the other characters, setting up the quest of the third film, much as The Empire Strikes Back sets up Return of the Jedi in its final moments. Will thinks that Elizabeth is now in love with Jack, as he saw her kiss him in the moments before his death, so his desire to save his father becomes his primary motivator over his relationship with Elizabeth. The ending also destroys the Black Pearl and gives the villain Cutler Beckett the heart of Davy Jones, unifying the two villains of the piece for the sequel. And most memorably, the ending brings back Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa from the dead as he’s the captain ready to take this crew to “world’s end” to return Jack to the land of the living.

The return of Captain Barbossa in the final frame of the film is like Nick Fury’s appearance in the post credit scene of Iron Man before the MCU was even a thing. Thus, it presages a form of blockbuster filmmaking that would come to dominate Hollywood. But unlike most of the films of the MCU, the return of Barbossa does not rely on extratextual information to make the viewer excited. This is the second Pirates of the Caribbean film and Barbossa was a key character in the first film. If you’re watching Dead Man’s Chest, it stands to reason that you’ve seen The Curse of the Black Pearl, and, thus, your excitement over seeing Barbossa return from the dead is about all the narrative possibilities that lie ahead because of what has come before.

In Iron Man, many viewers wouldn’t know who Nick Fury is lacking any cinematic precursor, but the MCU assumes you are familiar with the comic books and will be excited for their obsessive references, the little rewards for being a good fan. But Dead Man’s Chest is invested in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies as movies, as continuations of a story about these key characters and their quest to find freedom. Perhaps that’s why Barbossa’s appearance at the end of Dead Man’s Chest remains exciting all these years later, while the post-credit sequences of the MCU have no retrospective value.

For all the ways that Dead Man’s Chest paves the way for the franchise blockbusters that would come to dominate Hollywood, it’s ultimately a more classical film than what would follow. It’s big and brash, but made with a craft and care that is exceedingly rare in Hollywood blockbusters of our current era.

9 out of 10

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006, USA)

Directed by Gore Verbinski; written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, based on characters created by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert, based on Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean; starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Kevin R. McNally, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Naomie Harris, Tom Hollander.

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