First things first: there’s no way to even talk about the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 without spoiling the second film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The events of the third movie seem to pick up right where the second one left off, and by the time this movie begins lots of big things have happened to the characters. So if you’re afraid of having almost every part of the second Pirate movie spoiled, don’t read this!
Pirates 3 begins in the Orient, where Elizabeth Swann, Keira Knightley’s character, is taking a prisoner to the dread pirate Sao Feng. We soon see that she’s in cahoots with Barbossa, the evil ghost pirate from the first film. The spoilers are already beginning! The plan is to exchange the prisoner, who is hooded, for some charts Sao Feng has, but the whole thing is a scam. The prisoner is actually Will Turner, Orland Bloom’s character, and the heroes make off with the charts anyway.
It turns out that the charts are to help them find Davey Jones’ Locker, where Jack Sparrow went after he died in the last film. And again, the spoilers. The Black Pearl sank; it seems, with Jack on board. Jack is not in heaven or hell, though, but in Purgatory, which for him is a desert filled with weird crabs.
Jack is rescued, but things keep getting complicated as characters keep betraying one another and selling each other out. I don’t know what happens exactly at the end of the second film except that they fight a Kraken and everyone stops trusting each other.
Eventually the story builds to the gathering of a pirate armada, which will battle the armada of the Dutch East India Company, and the summoning of Calypso, the Goddess of the Seas. Along the way some characters from the first film will die, get married and others will become immortal.
The script that I have for review reads a little overstuffed and undercooked. There’s a lot going on, right from the first page, but it’s all too quick to mean much. The characters don’t get a lot of time to shine, and it was the characters that made the first film such a pleasant surprise. I have to wonder if much of Jack Sparrow’s stuff seems thin because it’s being left up to Johnny Depp to invent on the set.
The biggest problem with the script, though, is the comic relief characters of Pintel and Ragetti, who are always saying and doing dumb things in order to get a cheap laugh. Their antics may translate better on film, but on the page they were endlessly tired and lame, doing things like tying themselves to the mast upside down before their ship capsizes so that they’ll be right side up when it has rolled over. Hilarious.
The scope of the story is huge, and much more fantasy-based than the first film. Magic is everywhere in the script, as are monsters and other extra bizarre characters. We also meet the other pirates who are out there, including the infamous Blackbeard, who appears at Shipwreck Island, the pirate’s secret hangout. In this film the pirates feel more like a friendly motorcycle gang than separate bands of rampaging criminals.
For those who were excited to see the first Pirates extended into a trilogy – expect a fourth film! The ending of POTC 3 leaves things very wide open for yet another sequel, with the continued quest for immortality as a hinted at storyline. In fact the film has very little closure at all, leaving many of the characters exactly where they were at the beginning of the first film, or in some cases even worse places.
POTC 3 is a bigger story than the original, and even more buckles will be swashed. There are elements that don’t seem to work as well in the script, but since director Gore Verbinski is still tinkering with the script for this film on set, perhaps many of these problems will be addressed.
