Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

An adventure film set in the Caribbean. Pirates attack a town. The governor's daughter Elizabeth is taken, because of a coin she has kept since childhood. Will is a blacksmith. He is in love with her and needs to steal a ship to get her back. His partner is a pirate in a cell. Jack Sparrow lost his own ship to a mutiny and wants it back. From there the film is a chase. A harbour, a stolen ship, a pirate island and a cave. The opposition is cursed. Barbossa and his crew spent the stolen gold and can no longer die; in moonlight their real state shows, and they cannot taste anything. What the narrative is interested in is not treasure but hunger: the punishment in the curse is not immortality but the loss of all pleasure, and the film sets that up well. Jack Sparrow carries the picture. A hero who walks like a drunk, whose side is never clear, and who almost never fights. That reading worried the studio. Johnny Depp built the character from a rock musician and a cartoon character; the producers thought during filming that it would not work, and the actor did not back down. The part brought an Academy Award nomination. The source is not a film but a ride at an amusement park, and several images come straight from it. When it appeared, the pirate genre had been considered dead for years, and this film reopened it. Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are in the cast. Gore Verbinski directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants family adventure and a good villain. Who it is not for: anyone wanting something short; it runs over two hours and the middle wanders.