What a follow up to the initial instalment of the series! I hope it will end at trilogy (good things come in threes). And after some reasearch, it does end at three! The cast has been kept intact, same faces but different adventure. While the series started off with the audience wondering why Captain Jack Sparrow (played by the eccentric Johnny Depp) was without a crew despite his title of "Captain", the sequel slowly reveals the flaws in Jack's personality that makes him not much of a leader, but a lovable character all the same.
After having recovered his ship, the Black Pearl, from Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Jack now has to evade the dark overlord of the ocean, Davy Jones himself, in order to avoid repaying a "debt" which supposedly let him "borrow" the authority to head the Black Pearl in the first place, for thirteen years. What follows is that poor Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) fall prey to his charismatic lies as he persuades them to help him find the key to unlock the Dead Man's Chest. They find themselves dealing with the undead creatures of the Flying Dutchman, dodging cannonballs that are fired by ancient chainguns (imagine that!). By a stroke of Providence, Will chances upon his lost father who was briefly mentioned during the incident of the Aztec Gold in Curse of the Black Pearl. He vows to destroy the heart of Davy Jones so that his father will be emancipated from the undead roster of the Flying Dutchman.
The story behind the "Dead Man's Chest" is that Davy Jones carved his heart out after failing to pursue the woman of his desire. The heart is contained in a treasure chest buried somewhere and the key is literally kept close by Davy Jones. James Norrington (Jack Davenport), after falling out with the Navy, wants to get the heart to regain favour with the Navy and so that they can rid the seas of pirates by being able to make Davy Jones do their bidding. Jack on the other hand, wants the heart to dispel the curse cast upon him by Davy Jones for failing to relinquish his soul as the price to pay for power. Will wants to release his father who is part of Davy Jones’ crew, and he can only do so by destroying the master.
One beautifully orchestrated scene is the chase by Cannibals as Jack tries his utmost best to avoid open seas and stuck to the shoreline for fear of the attack by the Kraken. The funny bones will be tickled one way or the other as Jack’s crew escape from cages made from human bones and they rescue their good captain who is about to be roasted as sacrifice. Just the ludicrous ambling of Jack as he runs away, trussed up in rope most the time, is enough to send stitches to the stomach.
It is rather debatable as to whether Jack Sparrow really is a good or bad person at the core, especially if we look beyond the charming demeanour which seems to suggest that he is one who will risk his life to rescue the damsel in distress. When his ship was attacked by the Kraken, Jack actually abandoned ship in a boat, showing his cowardice. Many a time he is seen to be a walking contradiction, traversing the fine line between good and evil, lovable and loathable. He received his just desserts as Elizabeth tricked him into believing she has fallen for him and sacrificed him to the Kraken to save the crew. However, it seems that Elizabeth did not just smooch him solely for the sake of setting him up, as she was bawling silently at the end of their encounter with the dreadful minion of the deep sea, sent by Davy Jones to destroy Jack Sparrow. The Captain is a lost sheep when it comes to having a sense of righteousness; he is a good person only when the situation direly needed him to be, at best. Perhaps the best metaphor of this characteristic of his ambivalence is seen where despite having a compass that “leads people to where their heart really want to be”, Jack is always unable to point his men at the correct direction: under his control, the needle points in haphazard directions. He needed Elizabeth’s help in order to find the Dead Man’s Chest. The compass can be seen as his moral compass and he is caught between good and evil, not knowing which is stronger and thus the compass is unable to lead him where he wants to go.
Cultural stereotyping of the subjugated Oriental is portrayed by the undead crewman with the flimsy head which became a hermit crab after its body can’t find is head. The head speaks Cantonese to its body when Jack threw a fruit at it and its head got detached. Somehow it pokes fun at the East as being weaker, as the other crew members do not have any problems keeping themselves together (no pun intended).
Like most pirate-themed movies, Dead Man’s Chest draws reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), the title of the movie itself being an eponym to the recurring motif within the novel. Treasure Island has a song sung by pirates that went “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum”. There is a further wordplay within “Dead Man's Chest”; in the song, “chest” refers to the wooden box containing valuables, while in the film, it does fit in where the “chest” contains the heart of Davy Jones. Due to the nature of Davy Jone’s story, however, “chest” can also literally mean his upper torso, where the heart was carved out and mourns his unrequited love.
“Pirates of the Caribbean” has captured the imagination of both children and adults due to the different readings the audience can have. It can be a simple tale of gold-diggers and idealistic love birds versus the evil creatures that hail from the vile depths of the sea, or it can also be an enigmatic tale of good versus evil, where the good is capable of doing evil, and the evil is equally liable to do good. A major flaw that might cost the production company is that Davy Jones (if the chest, both figurative and literal, is referring an object owned by him) is more undead than dead, for the title “Dead Man’s Chest”. Celine Dion probably would love for him to revive her smash hit, "My Heart Will Go On". Even after leaving the body.
Useless fact of the day: Pirates of the Caribbean is actually a motion ride at Disneyland which inspired the movie. The third and final episode is entitled "At World’s End". Aptly named as Dead Man’s Chest ended off with the lady fortune teller asking if everyone was willing to travel “to the ends of the world” to find Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl. Shall not question the logic behind it, after all, the ship and Jack had apparently been destroyed by the Kraken.
