The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The African Queen. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There was a time when the modern blockbuster was synonymous with a filmmaking style that emphasized a sense of wonder and discovery, epic quests for wealth and glory, and the exploration of exotic, tangible locations \u2014 in other words, the adventure film.<\/p>\n
That time has come and gone, however. The adventure film is a fading relic of a bygone era; superhero films have overtaken the genre\u2019s box-office dominance, while its tropes and narrative beats have been assimilated by science fiction and fantasy franchises like Star Wars<\/a> and The Lord of the Rings<\/a>. Since the start of the 2020s, the genre\u2019s only notable mainstream releases have been Uncharted, a video game adaptation, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a fifth installment in a 45-year-old franchise. Back in 2003, however, Disney and relative newcomer Gore Verbinski breathed fresh life into the genre with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and its 2006 sequel, Dead Man\u2019s Chest, brought the franchise to its zenith while also setting up what should have been its swan song.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n When the original film was greenlit, Disney\u2019s apprehensions about adaptations of theme-park rides led the company to make several changes<\/a> (such as the late-stage addition of the subtitle). It all worked out, as The Curse of the Black Pearl grossed $654 million on a budget of just $140 million, and so the cast and crew almost immediately signed on for back-to-back sequels<\/a> in the style of the Matrix trilogy. <\/p>\n Indeed, Dead Man\u2019s Chest and its sequel, At World\u2019s End, make up a duology of their own \u2014 unburdened by the undeath attached to the first film\u2019s Aztec gold, the sequel follows Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) in a seafaring race against Captain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the corrupted crew of the Flying Dutchman. Everyone is trying to find the title chest, which allows the owner total control over the Dutchman and its captain.<\/p>\n Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio clearly studied the lineage of seminal sequels like The Empire Strikes Back and T2: Judgment Day, because the screenplay for Dead Man\u2019s Chest is a complex, grandiose expansion of what worked so well in the first film. A less-clever follow-up would\u2019ve simply taken that movie\u2019s neat resolution (Jack Sparrow\u2019s escape from the Royal Navy and Elizabeth and Will\u2019s passionate embrace) at face value, but instead new wrinkles and higher stakes are introduced in the opening 10 minutes: namely, Elizabeth and Will\u2019s arrest by the East India Trading Company, and Jack\u2019s past coming back to haunt him in the form of an unsettled debt with Davy Jones. <\/p>\n The smartest part of Dead Man\u2019s Chest is how the script perpetually puts our heroes at odds with each other.<\/p>\n Buena Vista Pictures<\/p>\n These complications lay the groundwork for a twisting, unpredictable plot predicated on a web of dubious allegiances and oppositional goals, and the constant, nonstop betrayals in the quest for the film\u2019s numerous MacGuffins create a playful air of deceit and mischief that would leave even the most shrewd pirates paranoid. Not coincidentally, one of the best parts of the entire series, exemplified in Dead Man\u2019s Chest, is the lack of safety polish on its central characters. <\/p>\n Before the age of the superhero resulted in blockbuster protagonists mostly being virtuous role models, characters like Han Solo and James Bond were allowed to be rougher around the edges, charismatic rogues whose demeanor didn\u2019t immediately suggest \u201chero.\u201d Naturally, Johnny Depp\u2019s approach to Jack Sparrow as a swaggering con-man fit that archetype, but the screenplay also forces Elizabeth and Will further into the pirate mentality, pushing them to be manipulative and self-serving to further their own ends. They\u2019re all far from outright villains, but watching them one-up each other in a Worst Allies competition is a smart alternative to the \u201cheroes reuniting on another quest\u201d trope, and the frayed nature of their loyalty is what makes their inevitable resolution in At World\u2019s End feel satisfying.<\/p>\n It\u2019s remarkable that Dead Man\u2019s Chest was only Gore Verbinski\u2019s second studio blockbuster (and sixth film), and yet the craftsmanship on display expresses an intentionality that\u2019s rapidly disappearing from films made on an equivalent scale today. Rossio and Elliott\u2019s screenplay deepens the world\u2019s lore and supernatural nature, and Verbinski and the creative team fill it all out with so much texture. Dariusz Wolski\u2019s cinematography presents breathtaking locations with a wondrous, majestic attention to natural beauty while shifting gears to suffocating darkness when needed, and the production design makes the Golden Age of piracy feel so tangible through evocative costuming and a lived-in quality. It\u2019s also impossible to ignore the stunning digital effects work \u2013 much has been said about the well-aged CGI used to bring Davy Jones to life, but that same attention to detail gives the mutated crew of the Flying Dutchman so much personality and flavor.<\/p>\n Davy Jones is still one of the most impossibly lifelike VFX characters ever put on screen.<\/p>\n Buena Vista Pictures<\/p>\n That same early VFX work, similar to what Lucas and Jackson were doing on the Star Wars prequels and The Lord of the Rings, is synthesized with an ingenious practical approach to the film\u2019s show-stopping setpieces. Even now, two decades later, each appearance of the Kraken feels menacing and insurmountable because it wasn\u2019t just an afterthought in the post-production process but was made tactile by the destruction of real sets enhanced by CGI. The same approach is what makes the seismic ship battles feel so thunderously real, while Verbinski\u2019s swashbuckling sense of scale even elevates what could have been a generic swordfighting sequence into one of the most memorable scenes in the trilogy, the three-way sword fight across Isla Cruces.<\/p>\n It\u2019s ironic that, alongside Davy Jones, the main antagonist of Dead Man\u2019s Chest is the villainous Lord Beckett, a representative of the imperialist East India Trading Company. The greedy colonial impulses of the real-world joint-stock company are constantly referenced by Beckett\u2019s ominous prophecies about how the world is changing, a stark contrast to the individual freedom experienced by the pirates he hunts, and it\u2019s hard not to think of it as a prediction of how the film industry itself was changing.<\/p>\n The adventure film was dying off, to be replaced by the increasingly bloated VFX-heavy blockbusters that the Pirates trilogy unwittingly helped usher in. But amid the sea of superhero films and corporate IP adaptations that have become the modern movie landscape, it\u2019s refreshing to look back at a time when even a movie based on a theme-park ride could still exist in the spirit of a freer, riskier, and more epic era of Hollywood filmmaking.<\/p>\n Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man\u2019s Chest is streaming on Disney+.Learn Something New Every Day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. 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