What Pirates of the Caribbean Should Have Done
Last week was a bit existential—even if only hyperbolically—and since we in the good ol US of A are having a holiday this week, I thought I’d write something I’ve been meaning to for a few months, since my wife and I watched all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
The first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies are all great. We can quibble and argue and all of us can collectively bray like a bunch of dumb goats about this, that, or the other thing, but I think, at this point, it’s fairly well accepted that that is a solid trilogy of movies.
There’s action, humor, adventure, romance, horror, surrealism, and buckets full of silliness that amount to something that kind of serious. And it all works! It’s a kitchen sink full of kitchen sinks wearing a buccaneer costume.
I love it.
And then we come to the fourth movie and the wheels didn’t so much fall off as get ejected into the stratosphere. This is really too bad since it’s kinda sorta adapting a very good novel by Tim Powers, which was a very good fit for this universe.
Alas.
And I know that much of what I’m about to suggest couldn’t happen because of career decisions by Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom but we’re wishing here.
Might as well use as much wishing as can be done.
The focus of the post-trilogy movies should have been the reunion of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner. As you may or may not remember, Will Turner is now the captain of the Flying Dutchman and so he is locked in the arms of the sea for eternity, only able to come ashore one day per decade. As we see at the end of the third movie, Elizabeth has a son who gets to meet his father for the first time.
Something the movies seemed to have forgotten, too, is that Elizabeth is the Pirate King. Yes, she goes to shore and seems to live her life, but she remains the Pirate King.
And so we pick up with this new story and she is the Pirate King. She grows harder and embittered towards the British Empire, which took so much from her. She raises her son as a pirate and though he’s only a young teenager, he’s already learning the ways of piracy.
He has his own plan in all this. He’s heard stories his whole life about his father and even his grandfather, cursed to the Flying Dutchman. More than that, he’s lived with people who have lived through curses, broken them, and found ways to keep going.
And so he presents a plan to free his father and presents it to his mother.
But she’s been hurt too much by fate and knows the dangers of playing with gods and monsters and curses, so she refuses. Tells him there’s no way. That only a madman would try.
Jump cut to Jack Sparrow doing Jack Sparrow type things.
Henry seeks him out, viewing him as the only possible ally in getting his father back. He finds Jack about to be executed for something debauchery or piracy related. Saving him, they make an alliance to save his father.
Jack has no real interest in this but he does like the sound of getting free and getting back on Elizabeth’s good side. Possibly even rekindling their friendship, or possibly more. But first he sees that Henry has a ship manned by at least a few pirates he knows.
Well, as it turns out, Elizabeth is not happy about her son taking his ship off to find his father and she wants him back, the way any mother wants a wayward teenager back. When she finds out that he’s looking for Jack Sparrow, she’s apoplectic, as people tend to be when discovering anyone likes Jack in these movies.
Jack finds out about this from Henry’s somewhat disgruntled crew who believed there was more in the winning than saving Jack Sparrow, who they don’t especially like. And so Jack makes a plan to mutiny and take Henry back to his mother. At the same time, he begins to like Henry and even feel for him. A fourteen year old boy leading a crew of grizzled pirates, unaware of the hell breaking loose beneath his own feet. And so, even as he plans to betray him, he teaches him what he can and befriends him.
But first they run into Barbarossa, who is now an agent of the crown as a privateer. Barbarossa has also been looking for Jack because people are always looking for Jack. There’s a bounty, as usual, and Barbarossa wants that sweet sweet gold.
Henry’s crew refuses to throw their lives away for him and his quixotic quest or for Jack so there’s no battle and Barbarossa takes possession of Henry’s ship and crew, and Jack returns to the Black Pearl for the first time in fourteen years.
Henry tells Barbarossa that he’s Jack’s son and Barbarossa figures this may as well be true and Henry’s crew goes along with the lie because why not.
Henry has, of course, heard of Barbossa as well and knows he was cursed, broke his curse, was killed, returned to the living, and so on. If anyone can help him deal with his father’s curse, it’s probably Barbossa. And so though he’s a captive, he begins digging for information. He’s a charming young lad, and he discovers this myth of Poseidon’s Trident (borrowing this from the fifth film, because why not). This Trident will allow him to break the curse on his father.
But Henry, though clever, isn’t as clever as he believes, and Barbossa begins scheming himself. He can tell the boy isn’t Jack’s. Even though Jack and the boy clearly have great affection for one another. As the weeks carry on, Barbossa finds he has a lot of affection for Henry as well.
However, he also sees a lot of value in getting on the good side of the captain of the Flying Dutchman. And, barring that, he at least sees the value in coercing the Flying Dutchman to do his bidding the way the East India company had him under their thumb in the third movie. And perhaps the best way to get that is to find this trident. The boy seems to believe in it so strongly, after all.
And the two old pirates begin to father this fatherless boy, each of them plotting to betray him and one another. Because Jack is needling his way into Barbossa’s crew who are less than happy to be working for the crown.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth has learned that Barbossa has captured her son and she raises an army to sink the Black Pearl once and for all.
This all comes to a head as a British fleet, Barbossa, and a pirate fleet all meet off the coast of Ireland with Barbossa cutting and running, leaving the Imperial Navy and the Pirate Armada to fight it out, while he goes to find the Trident.
And we leave the fourth movie there.
The fifth movie picks up right after
We begin with Elizabeth recalling the brief day she’s shared with Will and all that’s changed in her life since then. The brutalities and betrayals, and we see how the other pirates fear her. For she has become a terror on the seas, and she fears facing Will again, knowing how she’s changed.
Rather than fight the whole Navy there, she makes a truce, of sorts.
Let’s not get bogged down in the details.
This movie is all about Barbossa, Jack, and Henry adventuring and forming a strange kind of relationship, with both Jack and Barbossa standing in for the father Henry has never known.
So that’s one thread of this.
The other thread, and the main emotional weight of these post-trilogy movies, is about Elizabeth and her love for Will.
Fate, cruel fate, has kept them apart. They’ve been given a son, but Elizabeth could not give up the sea, the adventures. And for this, she was betrayed by friends like Jack and Barbossa, warred upon by Britain, and forced to fight an endless war on behalf of her son. To give him a future, a life.
It’s all quite misplaced and a bit tragic, especially as she’s now forced to encounter the supernatural monsters once more. The search for the Trident leads them to all kinds of reality breaking encounters and so on.
Eventually, through some chaotic misadventure, Henry falls into the sea and drowns.
There, he is saved by his father.
A father who has also been transformed by the years. Physically, sure, but also emotionally, philosophically. He’s become an eternal being, cursed to his ship, surrounded by the dead and the cursed.
How could he remain a man?
After losing Henry to the sea, Barbossa continues his search for the Trident and eventually finds it on some island where he maroons Jack once more.
And after misadventure, calamity, and the bumbling of Jack Sparrow, the ambition of Barbossa, and the mixture of love and hatred powering Elizabeth, we all climactically run into one another.
Elizabeth and Will are not who they were. Can never be, again, who they were for one another.
Barbossa seeks to control the seas with the Trident but Jack appears with some supernatural nonsense and smacks it out of his hands. Henry, Will, and Elizabeth all reach for it and some more magical nonsense happens and Will is freed!
Oh happy day!
But perhaps not quite, for they cannot simply go back to England—or anywhere, really—to live a happy life as a family.
So we get something a bit bittersweet.
Even roughly sketched as that was, I think it would be a thousand percent better than what we got out of the fourth and fifth movies.
Pirates of the Caribbean, for al the supernatural shenanigans, the Jack Sparrow capering, and the knottiest sort of plots imaginable, are really about Will and Elizabeth. The whole trilogy revolves around their love for one another. So removing them entirely for the fourth and fifth movies and focusing entirely on Jack makes the movies actively quite bad.
So we shift the focus back to Will and Elizabeth, to love and the many complications keeping two people apart.
But you bring them back together and show that it is not a dream. But it can be, if they’re willing to fight for it.
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The pirates sequels are amazing. They're like 'For a Few Dollars More' and 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' More ambitious, more subversive, more postmodern. Admittedly, DMC suffered from bad editing and messy storytelling due to a super rushed post production schedule that nearly killed Gore Verbinski, but AWE came out as a near-masterpiece.
I definitely agree with the fact that this was ALWAYS the Will/Elizabeth story. I mean, the writers were quite open about it in interviews, even discussing how they viewed Elizabeth as the overall main lead of the trilogy as a whole. Jack was always a side character, a wild card trickster that can play a key role in the story but doesn't quite work as its center.
Unfortunately, because Johnny Depp got more and more creative control over the series as it went on, he basically built the fourth and fifth films around himself, and the results were not great, to say the least. There were lots of other reasons for diminishing quality, of course, but I'd say this was one of the main reasons. Imo, if they had to make a Jack Sparrow movie, they should've gone the prequel route by adapting The Price of Freedom novel, which connected the dots in terms of how Jack went from being a sailor under Beckett to a pirate and sold his soul to Jones. Like, there you have an actual arc and everything.
I also think ideally they should've left AWE as the end. Like, the original plan was that Will would've been set free from his service because Elizabeth had been faithful to him for 10 years. That, sadly, for some reason got lost or edited out in post production.
(I don't know what that meant for the Dutchman - perhaps a new captain would've been elected out of the crew members?)