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Mikhail Skoptsov's avatar

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?)

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