Dead Man's Chest Part 2

So I last time I wrote about what bothered me about Pirates 2, but what did I like? Well everything else. The end. Oh.... alright...

I liked that the characters were expanded in this film and that each one had their own agenda. In this film, not only Jack, but every main character rides the line between good guy and bad guy. What will this character do...how far will he or she go...what are they willing to sacrifice, to get what they want. I really liked that. For me it added a bit more complexity to the characters around Jack, who in the first film, were all straight arrows.

The action scenes were done well and fun to watch. The three man sword fight on/in the wheel was inventive and different and the Kraken sequences were super cool. I was nervous about how the Flying Dutchman crew would look on the big screen, but with the exception of maybe conch shell head guy, they were all pretty cool looking and worthy successors to the skeleton pirates. Which brings us to the special FX highlight of the film...Davey Jones.

Actor Bill Nighy, who plays Davey Jones, spent his shoot with his face covered in motion capture dots, with the crew at ILM giving him the squid face. As I understand it director Gore Verbinski wanted to keep Nighy's real eyes, but the ILM team opted to do them digital as well. The amazing thing is how well all the emotion and subtlety of Nighy's performance meshes with tentacle moving squid face of Davey Jones. It was totally believable and demonstrates the arena in which motion capture performance and animation truly shine.

James Horner takes over musical duties this go around and some of the new music he wrote, particularly for Davey Jones and the Kraken, was just fantastic. The score for the 1st film by Klaus Badelt I really love, however it does suffer from too many repetitions of the familiar. For Pirates 2, Horner did a good job of blending what Badelt established with the new music.

Now if you buy the soundtrack there is a remix track at the end. In fact if you buy it from Best Buy there are 3 remix tracks. Apparently the folks at Disney marketing were trying to think of where else they could promote the film..."Hey why not Pirate dance tracks!! So when the kids go out to their favorite clubs Mr Dee Jay can play some hip hop pirate beats...maybe a new dance would break out kinda like the Teen Wolf but it would be the Jack Sparrow". These people were immediately promoted and given shiny cars.

Finally, I have been reading Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among Pirates by David Cordingly. It is really cool how much of the reality Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio blended into this movie and its predecessor. Tortuga existed and was a town run mostly by pirates. Pirates were incredibly superstitious and believed women would bring bad luck if on a ship. Many pirates were former Royal Navy officers who had been discharge or had grown disillusioned much like what happens to Norrington. Cutler Becketts offer to pardon Jack and make him a privateer, which was a nice way of saying sanctioned piracy, happened back in the day all the time. There are other examples. I found added fun seeing how the facts were woven into the fiction.