You know, any pirate movie made in these modern times is going to have a difficult time finding an audience. Anyone remember Cutthroat Island? You know, the ill-fated 1995 disaster that struggled to recoup $11 million of its $92 million budget? Yeah, neither does anyone else. I mean, I’m definitely not saying that it was a GOOD movie. But neither was Tomb Raider and that managed to bring in $130 million. Not bad for a poorly made popcorn flick.
So imagine my surprise when I learned that Disney had given the greenlight to Pirates of the Caribbean with a whopping $82 million budget, knowing full well how recent audiences have reacted to swashbucklers on the silver screen. Of course, I was eager to see a script so imagine my surprise when just a few days ago I wake up to find a copy of the shooting script lying on my front porch. A nice surprise for a Saturday morning. Grabbing a cup of hot chocolate I settled down on my beat-up old couch and began to read.
Let me just say, I can see why Disney would be willing to spend nearly $100 million to bring this baby to the big screen. After the disastrously gut-wrenching Country Bears I was terribly afraid of what other trash Walt Disney Pictures was going to force-feed their audience. Now, I have hope.
See, it’s not that Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Jay Wolpert have written something that’s going to win Oscars. It’s that they’ve managed to write something that is purely a simply a whole lot of fun. But let me start from the beginning.
The story, very basically, follows a captain, Jack Sparrow, (played by Johnny Depp) who teams up with Elizabeth Swann (the daughter of a Governor) to stop a band of cursed pirates from reversing their curse. Now what is this curse you may ask? Well see, the screenwriters have really cooked up something so delectable that I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I will anyways. Remember in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction right before the treasure rooms? The image of a lone skeleton piloting the remains of a broken ship? Yeah, it plays off of that. See, these evil band of pirates have been cursed that in the moonlight, they turn to skeletons. I mean, they can still talk and walk. But they become like a band of roving, possessed skeletons. Once I read that I understood where the script was going and I knew it was going to be fun.
Take a look at these pieces of concept art for the film. It just gives you a sense of how exciting the action pieces are for the film.
The thing is, to sum it all up, the movie is just plain fun. It doesn’t bog itself down with needless dialogue or trying to preach a message about acceptance or anything in that vein. It realizes what its job is and it runs with it with pleasure.
And that’s the beauty of Pirates of the Caribbean. It realizes it doesn’t need to be Citizen Kane to be an enjoyable movie, something that other films forget. It’s a light, breezy, and one hell of a fun script.
10 out of 10