Hear Me Out: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Hear Me Out is a column dedicated to earnest reevaluations of those cast-off bits of pop-cultural ephemera that deserve a second look. Whether they’re films, TV series, albums, comedy specials, videogames or even cocktails, Hear Me Out is ready to go to bat for any underappreciated subject.

Cinematic middle children have it rough. This was a common refrain of our previous Hear Me Out entry on The Matrix Reloaded, a gloriously unhinged action spectacle that managed to deepen the mythos of the sci-fi series while delivering fights and choreography on an entirely more ambitious level than its iconic original installment. But almost no one remembers that today, as all of the film’s best and most successful elements were obliterated from the cultural consciousness by the subsequent failure of its preeningly pretentious, overindulgent trilogy capper The Matrix Revolutions, released only six months later. Conceptually, Reloaded proved too interconnected with the ultimate letdown of Revolutions, which served to posthumously drag its reputation down into the abyss.

But such abuses of franchise middle entries are hardly a new phenomenon, as they frequently end up as the most derided films in the sequence. And to be certain, it’s often deserved–you’re never going to see a Hear Me Out entry on Attack of the Clones, I can at least promise you that. But almost the same exact retroactive scorn that was heaped on The Matrix Reloaded also ended up being hurled at another box office juggernaut only a few years later, a movie that went from being one of the highest grossing successes of all time to a film that barely seems to register with audiences now, less than 20 years later. We’re talking, of course, about the soaringly ambitious swashbuckling of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Today, Dead Man’s Chest seems to be viewed as as the launching point for a veritable flotilla of soulless Pirates sequels, each more cynically calculated for bland, mass-market palatability than the previous. But this view overlooks the merits of the first Pirates sequel by tying it too closely to the films that followed, denigrating Dead Man’s Chest undeservingly while simultaneously assigning a bit too much credit to the original Curse of the Black Pearl in retrospect. Truth be told, the original entry in the series has not aged as well in reality as it has in the fondness of popular imagination, while its first sequel still holds up quite well thanks to its more expansive imagination and markedly more adult tone, along with the dynamic performances of a few key contributors.

This is the key selling point of Dead Man’s Chest: It is a far more ambitious, grim, lushly appointed and macabre swashbuckling adventure than Curse of the Black Pearl was three years earlier. From its very opening moments it sets this tone, with Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) escaping from an absolutely nightmarish island prison fortress that looks like it would be owned and operated by Sauron, amidst the screams of prisoners having their eyes pecked out by crows, floating away in a coffin with the rest of the corpses. Of course Jack isn’t actually dead, but he does come out clutching a clue to the film’s MacGuffin: The “dead man’s chest,” which is said to contain the heart of Flying Dutchman captain/supernatural menace Davy Jones.

Thus begins a sprawling hunt for the heart, which every character wants to possess for their own reasons. Jack needs a bargaining chip to call off his debt with the supernatural figure, payment for once raising The Black Pearl from the depths. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) needs the heart to both obtain a MacGuffin of his own, free his father from servitude and ensure the safety of his lady love. The former Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) needs the heart to redeem himself in the eyes of the Royal Navy, if he wants any chance of ever regaining his former station in life. And overarching, aristocratic antagonist Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) wants the heart for mastery over the sea itself, which will allow the East India Trading Company to overcome the last vestiges of the wild and supernatural Caribbean and bend the region entirely to the Crown’s will. Symbolically, this makes Dead Man’s Chest a Tolkien-esque struggle between the romanticism of the old world and the insidious, creeping corruption of modernity and “progress,” a theme that director Gore Verbinski would turn to again in his animated masterpiece/Johnny Depp reunion Rango in 2011. As is again the case there, the literal monsters and beasts of the frontier that initially seem so fearsome ultimately pale in comparison to the evil weight that can be thrown around by small, cruel men with their ledgers and fountain pens.

The original Curse of the Black Pearl, in comparison, feels considerably more chintzy when revisiting today. To its credit, it is carried superbly by the duo of energetically deranged performances from Depp and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa, but its action scenes feel much more a product of soundstage stunt choreographers, limited by imagination and a somewhat lower budget. The tone, likewise, reads as distinctly juvenile throughout, more targeted at kids than adults, with a quippy insincerity that serves to rob some of the threat that should be represented by the undead pirate antagonists. There’s a bloodlessness to it all, a sense of Disney trying to reach the safest family demographic possible on a concept they were unsure was going to be a success.

Dead Man’s Chest, on the other hand, is clearly shaped by that success, and feels much more like Disney stepping back to allow Verbinski to make the more adult swashbuckling story of his dreams. The tone has matured significantly, now steeped in an overt sense of gothic horror and the fantastical, as the supernatural world clashes against the steady, tyrannical march of the British empire. There’s more subtext on colonialism, and a more captivatingly realistic depiction of the backbreaking work of a mariner in the 1700s. The ships are grimier, the monsters more grotesque; even the Hans Zimmer score is more sweepingly operatic and moody. The bombastic action setpieces represent another level of ambition entirely compared to the modest sword fights of Curse of the Black Pearl, and come with a greater edge of danger to them. From start to finish, Dead Man’s Chest feels like it earns its PG-13 rating more authentically than Curse of the Black Pearl did … while avoiding slipping into the increasingly pretentious grandiosity of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End a year later. This first sequel pulls off an always difficult balancing act: Knowing how to make everything feel bigger and bolder, without overshooting into the realm of absurdity.

And the key to it all? If you’ve seen the film, then surely you know that it’s Davy Jones. Bill Nighy gives what is undoubtedly one of his finest performances as the Flying Dutchman captain, with motion capture-aided CGI that has held up insanely well almost 20 years later, deserving mention right alongside Andy Serkis’ Gollum in The Two Towers as one of the first digital characters to truly redefine what was possible in a major motion picture. Find me another CGI character of this era that looks as intricately detailed and alive as Davy Jones still does today, his every tiny facial tentacle twitching to match Nighy’s slightest expression. The actor’s distinct facial features and mannerisms were so well-preserved in the process, in fact, that some viewers reportedly believed that Davy Jones was a physical creation, Bill Nighy in a beautifully articulated full-body costume. What higher compliment could there be to the team that brought the character to life?

No other film in the Pirates series can compare to the sheer menace that Jones brings with him in his initial introduction in Dead Man’s Chest, and it opens up a fascinating metaphysical can of worms in the process. The imperious Jones sneers at the resolute Christian sailor who tries to use his faith as a shield, laughing off the idea that such a symbol would have any power over him. Is Jones an emissary of the devil? It certainly doesn’t seem so, even though he uses the universal human fear of death to recruit for his crew of the damned. It instead feels more like Jones is the conduit for some ancient force of the natural world that falls outside the purview of the traditional heaven and hell. Is Jones just the latest in a long line to wear this mantle, and why exactly does “The Dutchman need a captain,” as the film cryptically states? What would happen if the cycle is broken? For a popcorn-munching summer actioner, you don’t expect to be given quite this much to think about in the film’s surprisingly rich lore.

Sadly, the treatment of Jones is also a major part of why trilogy capper At World’s End comes crashing down after being handed the baton by Dead Man’s Chest. To take such an incredibly operatic, imposing villain and then dissatisfyingly force him into bonded servitude to much more mundane forces fits the narrative of the pirate world’s clash against modernity, but there’s absolutely nothing gratifying about it for the audience. Likewise, Jones’ romantic baggage with Calypso feels forced into becoming a genuine plot point–it was better served when the audience understood instinctively that he was tortured by a lost love in Dead Man’s Chest, playing his feelings out on the organ like the Phantom of the Opera, rather than making everything literal and concrete. These were aspects of the character we didn’t need to see, and they only diminish the stature of Jones that is so terribly imposing when we first meet him in Dead Man’s Chest. He ends up lost in the noisy conclusion of the trilogy, a minor piece of an overstuffed mess.

For a brief time in 2006, though, Pirates of the Caribbean had seemingly unlocked a new level of creative sophistication with Dead Man’s Chest. It was a greater realization of Gore Verbinski’s macabre dreams, the likes of which make us wish he had indeed successfully brought his Bioshock movie to fruition in the 2010s. Regardless, even if his trilogy failed to stick the landing, it shouldn’t diminish the scintillating debut of a character like Davy Jones; the way he made audiences’ blood run cold. The Pirates series may now be languishing on mothballs, but Dead Man’s Chest still feels like it was dredged up just yesterday.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.