Pirates of the Caribbean: Reviewing the Franchise

Comments · 601

• HA

  @harrenhals · 1 year ago

  I actually really like that Davy Jones, literal mythological figure and personification of the mystery of the sea, ends up controlled and colonised by the East India Trading Company. The metaphor is pretty heavy handed, admittedly, but I like it.

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• FR

  @freazeezy · 3 years ago

  One thing I noticed on my rewatch of black purl is that Jack was never really that bad of a guy. He doesn't kill anyone when he steals the interceptor, he blows his own cover to save Elizabeth and one of the most famous stories about him is that he ransacked a port without even firing a shot. Gentleman pirate Jack

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• RO

  @ropesquid2085 · 2 years ago

  The woman absolutely KILLING IT on the cello at the 10min mark was simultaneously so fucking lit and so fun it made me almost giggle, I love it so much.

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• PE

  @pepperpeterpiperpickled9805 · 3 years ago

  In Australia, Salazar's revenge was called "dead men tell no tales" which I think is more fun

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• OR

  @Orangutanpt2 · 2 years ago

  I liked when the cat got arrested for eating pizza

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• KA

  @Kalosius · 4 years ago

  My darkest secret is that I watched all 7 movies in 1 day.  I will never tell anyone in person.  It was really rough near the end but the beginning was fire.

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• NO

  @nonexist_kun · 3 years ago

  I love Dead Man&apos;s Chest, as far as I&apos;m concerned this franchise is a duology. I agree it&apos;s messier and not nearly as neat and tidy as Curse was, but I think it does what all good sequels do - delve deeper into the themes of the first film with more of a focus on the characters and set up for a shitty plot centered third movie rather than have its own ending. <br><br>I think the &quot;love triangle&quot; with Elizabeth is almost the sole reason I&apos;ve watched DMC as many times as I have. I don&apos;t think it&apos;s actually a love triangle, but I do think she wants Jack to think that&apos;s what it is, which is why it&apos;s so on the nose. I think Elizabeth hates Jack with a seething passion and fears his chaotic influence on her life. If Jack is a trickster god, Elizabeth recognizes that he is dangerous and unpredictable and fears what he&apos;ll do to satiate his own greed, and sets out to kill the god. <br><br>Elizabeth is my favorite character in this film, and that&apos;s not despite her only being given &quot;lady&quot; things to do, but because I think the opposite is true. I think she&apos;s the most level headed and proactive character in the movie, despite ultimately being wrong about the conclusion she comes to; she more so is the only one thinking about why anything is happening and what can possibly be done about it, while Jack is too petrified of death to think straight (he doesn&apos;t know what he wants because he thinks he&apos;s going to die and that sends him on a spiral of bucket list thoughts) and Will is caught up in the emotions of discovering his father&apos;s fate. In the end, like Will before the events of the first film, Elizabeth chose to believe in the system of law that robbed her of her wedding and to blame the pirate way of life that openly defies the rule of law.<br><br>In the end, she had to become what she feared Jack to be in order to get rid of him - treacherous. But in the face of the grief she caused everyone who trusted Jack, it suddenly dawns on her that in her desperation she used him as a scapegoat to excuse the real villains (capitalism, greed in its final boss second phase, it&apos;s just good business) for the injustice done to her and her fiance (making her crusade as &quot;Pirate King&quot; against Beckett at least cathartic on paper). Watching the guilt crush her in that final scene is the emotional gut punch of the second movie more than what happens to Jack, and the promise of bringing him back is less a promise of a fan favorite character&apos;s return, but a promise that Elizabeth will have to answer for what she did. Promises promises.<br><br>The entire premise of Dead Man&apos;s Chest is that Jack&apos;s time as a god has come to its end, and he is put in a position of sacrificing mortals to regain his immortal status, figuratively speaking... or literally? I dunno. So Will is the unwitting victim, and Davy Jones&apos; death grip on Will&apos;s family is the metaphorical cost of Jack&apos;s greedy nature, which he overcomes, but not before Elizabeth catches onto the fact it all sources to him and his irresponsibility as a captain. It&apos;s a serious interrogation of the first film&apos;s whimsical ideals surrounding piracy and greed. I think it&apos;s sophisticated. Kinda.<br><br>Jack goes back to save his crew in the end, and that&apos;s what Elizabeth fails to consider when she takes matters into her own hands and closes the trap she was laying out for him throughout the entire movie. It had nothing to do with the monster being after him, it had everything to do with her blaming him for her misfortunes and seeking her own justice. It was especially about her seeking freedom from Jack&apos;s influence, hence Jack&apos;s final accusatory word to her, &quot;pirate.&quot; Jack suddenly realized what she&apos;d really been doing the whole time - learning from him, pretty much doing to him the same thing he did to Barbosa (which is why it&apos;s thematically rad as heck that it&apos;s Barbosa who&apos;s back at the end to save him).<br><br>Thematically, DMC is about diminishing freedom. The walls of systematic greed are closing in around all the characters, and that pushes them to cross the lines they drew in the sand in the first film. It&apos;s a series about pirates, so of course it&apos;s about what pirates care about, things like a feeling of freedom and the vices of greed. These characters are in search of the power to attain those things in a world with superpowers of industry threatening to take everything they care about. Of course that power, in this universe, comes from a bunch of weird pirate folk lore trinkets.<br><br>And yes, there is no real freedom and that&apos;s the point. Nobody is content with what they have. Jack finally has the Black Pearl, but it cost him everything he thought it would bring him. Elizabeth wasn&apos;t content to have Will, she wanted Will minus the life of piracy she knew came strings attached when she found him afloat at sea. Will wasn&apos;t content with winning Elizabeth&apos;s affection, he wanted to free his father from the consequences of his own greed. The only point to the events of At World&apos;s End is the outcome in relationship to the themes DMC lays out.<br><br>I do think DMC is the best of them all because, despite its messiness, it builds on the first film&apos;s story in such a complex and interesting way, and challenges the characters in ways the more straight forward adventure of the first film didn&apos;t. <br><br>You can&apos;t really argue that any sequel would have established a franchise without the first film breaking ground. Would The Empire Strikes Back have been able to kick start Star Wars without the first movie&apos;s explanation of the Force and the Empire&apos;s super nice and fun space politics? Would Terminator 2 have been able to kick start that series without the first movie establishing what a terrifying force of nature the machines were? <br><br>Most of the best sequels in cinematic history tend to have a subversive quality to them, existing in conversation with their predecessor. Would Dead Man&apos;s Chest be as great as I think it is without Curse of the Black Pearl? Nope. It would be nonsense without that initial context. But I really think it succeeds in taking it a step further in the right direction... before driving it off a cliff in a very confused about where to take things third installment.<br><br>Sorry I&apos;m gushing, but if I give you an entire essay response you know I found your video interesting; not that I don&apos;t know I&apos;m a little out of pocket for assuming anyone will read my incessant rambling.

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• DR

  @dr3951 · 2 years ago

  I really appreciate how much casual warmth is in this video! &nbsp;It&apos;s like going home after a movie, grabbing a pizza on the way, and happily overanalyzing the film and storytelling and life problems on the couch until 3 AM sneaks by.

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• MA

  @markfoster7882 · 4 years ago

  Holy shit. A long-form video essayer who can actually do interesting analysis and give original thoughts. My new favorite channel.

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• QW

  @qwinlyn · 2 years ago

  &quot;only Disney PG-13 property&quot;<br><br>Yeah, that&apos;s what they used to have Touchstone for. Then they shut it down and just stopped making the adultier movies.

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• OC

  @Ocrilat · 4 years ago

  I saw the original Pirates 8 times in the theatre. I watched the next two sequels once each, and skipped the rest. I can&apos;t describe the falling quality any better than that.

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• HO

  @HoMinhAudio · 2 years ago (edited)

  &quot;Big blockbuster movies [are] basically the only place we get A LOT of money and resources put into people making art&quot;<br>and<br>&quot;It&apos;s an appreciation for the beauty in language that exists outside of the information being conveyed (and that&apos;s really awesome)&quot;<br>are two of my favorite statements ever heard. Awesome work, this channel should be bigger.

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