SPARROW RETURNS
Pirates reboot hard to follow
It’s great to have a job watching — and then writing about — movies. But why does Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales have to feel so much like work?
It’s always been something of an effort to keep track of who’s alive or dead or undead in this multi-sequel epic featuring walking pirate ghosts and characters who get killed off in one instalment, only to be magically resurrected in the next — especially after what feels like eight long movies.
What do you mean, this is only the fifth one? At over 12 hours total running time, the Pirates saga is starting to make the storytelling in The Lord of the Rings feel fleet by comparison. And a post-credits stinger scene tacked on to the new film hints that Dead Men Tell No Tales may not be the “final adventure” after all, as trailers once promised.
But never mind.
When POTC 5 opens, the series’ dissolute, chronically soused pirate anti-hero, Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), is still alive, even though one character speculates that he may not be.
Yes, Depp is looking a little worse for wear these days, but a special effect, deep into the movie, uses digital trickery to recreate what his character looked like as a young man. Like the similar reanimation of the young Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, it’s an impressive bit of CGI prestidigitation.
As you may remember, Jack’s beloved ship, the Black Pearl, has been shrunk to the size of a toy, which he carries in a bottle around his neck. That happened in the fourth film. (Or was it the third?)
His replacement vessel, in an attempt at humour that epitomizes the tone of the cheesy screenplay, is called the Dying Gull. Other yuks fall into the category of mildly naughty Dad jokes, and include a ribald misinterpretation of the word horologist. At another point, Kaya Scodelario’s scientist character, referring to a celestial chart, says, gesturing heavenward, “The map is there.” To which a dimwit pirate replies: “At the tip of your finger?”
It’s like The Three Stooges, only with swords.
After a ridiculously bloated early set piece centring on a bank robbery — in which an entire building is dragged through the streets of St. Martin, like a massive, rickety sleigh — Jack’s services are sought in the recovery of Poseidon’s trident, a mystical talisman thought to have the power to break curses.
And there are two of them in need of breaking here: As shown in a short prologue, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is still trapped in a state of putrescent decay aboard the shipwrecked Flying Dutchman, and his son (Brenton Thwaites) means to free him from that fate.
The other accursed soul belongs to Captain Salazar, a Beetlejuice-like wraith trapped in something called the Devil’s Triangle. Javier Bardem has a lot of fun with the role of the villain, spitting out the name Jack Sparrow — which he pronounces something like “Yuck Epatto” — as if it were a piece of rotten food.
Salazar has got an old vendetta with Jack — which we find out about later, along with one other big reveal that feels less like a blockbuster than a nothing burger.
Other than that, there’s not much that you need to know. There are naval chase scenes and booming cannons, and more visual effects that you can shake a cutlass at, including one scene that resembles the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
Another sequence, featuring Jack stuck in a guillotine that is twirling around and around, like a lethal fidget spinner, is particularly fun, if also characteristic of the amusement-park esthetic of the film, which seems capable of inducing excitement, exhaustion and nausea, in that order.
Yes, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales remains true to its Disney theme park roots.
Loud, overstimulating and hard to take in all in one sitting. It feels like the vacation you’ll need a vacation from.
THE AUDITION PROCESS
“I was handed the script years ago when I was doing the rounds the first time,” Scodelario says. “I think it was two female characters then.”
She was filming the second Maze Runner movie when an invitation to audition came around again. Instead of showing up in person, the actress did a video with “all the Maze Runner boys” playing assorted Pirates parts. Months later, she met with Thwaites, who was already cast after a few auditions, to do a chemistry read. “We had a really cool connection and it went from there,” Scodelario says.
THE FAN FACTOR
Both saw their first Pirates movie as teens. “I was 14 and she was 13,” Thwaites says.
Recalls Scodelario: “I remember it being a huge part of the social scene at school before social media.”
Scodelario says she was anxious to meet Johnny Depp at the initial table read of the script “so I got that out of the way.”
It was another story much later on set in Australia when Depp showed up as Captain Jack. “I completely lost it,” she says. “I went full fan girl.”
HANGING AROUND
In the opening of the film, Scodelario’s Carina is to be hanged when her astronomy thoughts are confused with witchcraft musings.
“It was quite scary, actually,” she says of the hanging sequence. “I didn’t think it would freak me out as much as it did.”
To make matters more complicated, the actress had previously dislocated her shoulder slipping on the deck of the Black Pearl. “I had to wear a sling between takes.”
Researching witchcraft was easier. Scodelario was born on Friday the 13th.
“And my mom is Brazilian and she’s very superstitious and says that I have a witch’s freckle on my ear. I tapped into my witchy side.”
A SIXTH PIRATES PICTURE
“I think it would be really cool, especially with how Carina ends this movie with a new identity,” Scodelario says.
The end kind of feels like the start of their journey,” Thwaites says.