![]() ![]() Plus Dead Man’s Chest’s half-fish, half-man sailors and At World’s End’s jaunt into purgatory make Barbossa and his crew’s curse seem like a case of seasonal allergies. Suddenly, there’s a much broader, deeper context to the piracy at hand than just two rival captains, taking into account the reach of the East India Company and the colonialism of the time. Though still full of high-spirited action, they turn the first film’s relatively contained nature into a small part of a much greater, much more magical mythos. The Curse of the Black Pearl was loosely based on the Disney park ride Pirates of the Caribbean, which first debuted in 1967. His signatures flesh out the universe of the films, too, as some scenes are what I would call “pure Gore.” The scene in At World’s End where the Black Pearl is transported across a desert by millions of crabs was Verbinski’s idea, drawing from the director’s love of Hayao Miyazaki’s work and his desire to break free from “the rules of live-action filmmaking.” Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who penned the first four Pirates films, are the greater architects of the world, but find a perfect partner in Verbinski and his fascination with body horror, mortality, and revisionist history. The second and third Pirates movies forgo that “but.” Instead, Verbinski begins with the strange details - At World’s End opens with a child being hanged, which seems inconceivable in Disney’s family-friendly world - and molds a show-stopping universe around them. Like The Curse of the Black Pearl, the movie is more often categorized as one thing - in this case, slapstick comedy - but could easily be classified as horror, too. In a movie like Mouse Hunt, Verbinski goes to great lengths to make a hunted mouse’s retaliatory traps terrifying. ![]() But like the first Pirates movie, they have an undeniable undercurrent of eccentricity that’s ultimately what’s most memorable about them. His three films leading up to The Curse of the Black Pearl are a little tamer, in that their unusual elements, like the flickering around Samara in The Ring or the sheer number of crosses tucked into The Mexican, are wrangled in service of the story rather than given free range. Image: Walt Disney Picturesĭead Man’s Chest and At World’s End are springboards into the grand wilderness of Verbinski’s imagination. They’re both breathtaking, and still unlike any blockbuster that followed in their wake. Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End are blown-up, bizarro versions of the movie from which they spawned, having exploded from a rebellious one-off action movie into a gigantic, uncontrollable mass of mutated cinematic flesh. Backed by Disney, the director and his franchise evolved - less like Pokémon, becoming bigger and stronger versions of the same thing, than the drastic transformation of Tetsuo in Akira. The Lone Ranger uses a pastiche of spaghetti Westerns as a lens to address Westward expansion and the mythologizing of American history.īut the films may not have happened if Verbinski hadn’t jumped from The Curse of the Black Pearl to second and third Pirates. Rango becomes a full-blown Western after a pet lizard gets lost in the desert. A Cure for Wellness, in which a man investigates a mysterious rehabilitation center, plunges into the well of gothic horror. The curse is explored to its goriest extent when our heroes plant a bomb inside one pirate’s body.Īll three movies Gore Verbinski’s directed since his final Pirates movie, 2007’s At World’s End, all possess a similar grotesque grandeur, and spin relatively simple premises into phantasmagorias. The villains, it turns out, are undead pirates who become skeletons under the moonlight. The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, more than delivers on a promise of swashbuckling high-seas action, but a surprisingly potent strain of horror runs through the whole thing. Grab your cutlass and hoist the colors: here be Polygon’s take on all things PotC. With the Pirates of the Caribbean movies more accessible than ever, and a summer season void of blockbusters, this month we’re diving deep into Disney’s swashbuckling series. ![]()
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