 Savvy? Ooh, that's a hot mug, guys! Hey guys, this is my review for Pirates of the Caribbean. This was a film that was chosen by my Patreon Gold Membership supporters. Thank you guys for choosing this film. I'll be straight up honest, I really, really feel that Pirates of the Caribbean is a near-on, if not a completely perfect movie. This came out in 2003, just when the whole Lord of the Rings phase was starting to come to an end with the third film slowly on the way. Orlando Bloom was hot, hot, hot goddamn shit. Keira Knightley was absolutely gorgeous, if completely illegal, technically at the time of filming this movie, and Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp already had quite a bit of critical acclaim to his name at the time. He had done a bunch of movies, kind of lowbrow here and there, but he had a recognition for being something. This is the movie that blew him out of the fucking stratosphere. Jack Sparrow has got to be one of the best anti-hero characters ever put on screen in the 20th century, at least in the latter half of the 2000s, if anything he's one of the best characters that's ever been created by Disney. And that is because this script went through development hell. This script, if I'm correct, was in development for more than 20 years. Constant revisions, changes, making it about classically well-known legends of pirate lore, but then they would take them out and put them back in, they would change it around again, they would try to make it more realistic, they kind of make it more like Treasure Island, and then other times they'd try to make it a little bit more mythical. In the end, they didn't go with any of them. They didn't go with any of the big pirate lore, not into the latter movies, but they would still keep that supernatural element to it, but they would have completely unknown character. And how the film introduces all of them, including Jack, is incredibly well done. Speaking of Jack, his introduction is probably one of the best character introductions I ever got to see as a kid. Hell, it's still a fan-fuckin'-tastic introduction today. The fact that he comes in on the boat as it's sinking, but how they frame it, they make it look like he's this big, bestowic captain, when really he's literally just surviving on the skin of his teeth. That is his character throughout the whole movie. The flatter films would kind of make him a little bit more of that odd, sort of weird mentality, but this one he nails that he's dead on a great character because you can't tell if he's actually going to do the right thing for a considerable amount of the movie. Obviously in the latter ones, you know he's the good guy, but this movie, he is in the middle. We have the clear hero being Will Turner trying to save the damsel in distress, being Keira Knightley's character, Elizabeth Swan. All the while, there are these pirates who are trying to undo a curse that was put on them by themselves over 10 years ago. And while I've talked about how great Johnny Depp is in this movie, the real, real underdog, the person who honestly steals the show every time he's on screen and having finally watched the other two after the third one was the only one who actually kept consistently good throughout this entire fucking series is Jeffrey Rush as Barbosa. Jeffrey Rush is my favorite goddamn character out of all of the movies, and it's not just because he has a massively awesome hat. Jeffrey Rush throughout the whole film, you can tell, is having a fucking ball of a time. His mannerisms as Barbosa are fantastic to watch. He's humorous, he's evil, but he's funny. He almost seems like a cool guy to hang out with until you realize he's a dead, murderous pirate, but he encapsulates the exact idea of what I thought pirates were when I was a kid. He's the reason why I dressed up as a pirate three times in a row for Halloween, I wasn't really that creative. But that idea of complete anarchy and doing what you want and just being a cool badass about it. Jeffrey Rush's Barbosa is so good at the same time you almost can feel sympathetic for him and all it comes down to is an apple. That is such a great little element to him. Not only does he have that fantastic bite of the apple, where just all over his face, but he's got a lot of really great shots in this film. Like when they break the mass of the interceptor and it falls down and he's just standing there all badass, it falls next to him. The camerawork, the absolute attention to detail and the production design in this film all flow together so well with the characters and the atmosphere and the setting that they're in. And a lot of that is due to the director Gore Verbinski, Verbinski? I'm not going to get it right. But he did a great job with these movies. And finally enough, it's the only ones I really know him for. I know he's done a few horror movies both before and after he did the ring, but this was the movie that I knew him for. This trilogy and the coloring, the character design, the filthiness of it all, even the attention detail of every one of the bad pirates having scurvy, really rotty looking eyeballs and just really bad contacts. And any time they come up right close to the camera, you can tell it's contact lenses because it stops around the outer lining of the eyeballs. But that level of filthy scummary was completely gone in the fourth movie. If I ever get to the fourth film, I will shred that piece of shit apart. I hated Stranger Tides. And most of that is purely because of the change in terms of how they shot the movie. But either way, this film is a great action piece right from beginning to end. It starts off with that mystery of what pirates are and kind of the legend of the gold coin and what it entails. Port Royal gets sacked by the pirates, and there's that little cool bit with the pulpit. Well wants to risk his life to save Elizabeth Swann, the woman he loves, but he can't do that without the help of Jack Sparrow. The two team up to try and take on Barbosa in a means that is incredibly humorous because the stunt work, oh yeah, the stunt work. The stunt work in this film is probably one of the big reasons why I watched it as well over and over and over again. I wore the VHS out repeatedly, watching several of the fight scenes. Particularly one of my favorites is one of the ones at the beginning of the movie when Jack is trying to escape and then him and Will have this fantastically choreographed sword fight scene. Having just watched The Musketeer, which I love the choreography in that movie, but it's dumb. This is admittedly a lot more toned down, but still a very thematic, very fantastical version of sword fights. Obviously it's not real, but it's still really fun to watch. And that is at the crux of it all, is that pirates is incredibly fun to watch. I can watch this movie any time of the day at any point, and I will watch it till it's over cause I enjoy it that much. This movie is going to turn 20 years old in two years. And it is aged like fine god damn line. This is honestly one of the best original movies that Disney ever released. After this movie came out, they realized I had to kind of change their game in terms of how they were producing movies because before they were just kind of putting out mediocre kind of whatever movies, like straight to DVDs, or in kind of low-brow 20, 30 million, maybe 40 million dollar movies with actors and like feel good stories. This was the first time they really took a big leap in a long time. This movie cost something like 150 million dollars to put together when the subsequent sequels would cost even more. And that was a big risk because the last time that anyone had taken a big chunk of money to make a pirate-related movie was Cutthroat Island, which still to this day is one of the biggest box office bombs in the history of cinema. So Disney did take a big risk with making this movie but everything pays off. Watching these characters go through the stripes that they're on, all the wild being both fearful for their lives but also laughing your ass off at how things are proceeding. We have great visual elements, not only with how the ship battles take place but also the basically the dead pirates. They couldn't just be satisfied with having them be very well rendered skeletons, moving skeletons, moving dead corpses. Some people will think of the scene where Elizabeth's on the boat and she's seeing them all work at night on the moonlight but my favorite shot and really one of my all time favorite shots in cinema is when the pirates are taking a walk and they're coming at the boat at the end of the movie from underwater and they emerge from the dark murkiness of the water and you can see them walking in slow motion. So good, because as the moonlight is hitting them they're going back and forth between their human form and then their undead form. And they do this on both on the fight on the boat but also with Jack Sparrow and Barbosa as they're rolling through the very, as they're moving through the various shines of moonlight you see them go back and forth and sometimes they'll use it to their advantage. There's a lot of really great little bits in this movie like when they're fighting the three pirates, Will and Elizabeth and he puts the bomb and hit one of the guys as he's undead and then kicks him out of the moonlight and he's back to human form. That's a great little bit. I'm amazed they got away with that considering they totally blew that guy to kingdom come but at the same time something else that should be very much commended about this movie is that it does not set up any kind of goddamn franchise that doesn't even set up a sequel. All it needed to do was have Jack hold up the compass and then snap it. That is it because the compass was just this vague ambiguous item of this film. Some would say that the black pearl is a big bit of it. Some would say that Jack Sparrow's hat is a big bit of it but my favorite little prop of this movie if there was any prop to be had from this movie I would ask for that compass because that is the crux of what will be the latter two movies even though they didn't even know they were gonna make them. That is how you do good forward building. That's how you do good teasing. You're not setting up a fucking industry. You're just giving a little bit of a tease of what could happen and in the end it did. It turned into one of Johnny Depp's biggest career roles of his entire life. It also gave him a lot of goddamn money. The following two films while being a little bit varied in terms of how they're received. I don't mind dead man's chest actually. I do quite like it. I've come to appreciate it more even world's end. I've also come to appreciate that more. The other two are shit though. These movies are very, very bad. This movie set up a part of my childhood and into my teenage years. This movie was a constant rewatch on the VHS when I was a kid. Now I realized that I went through this whole review and I did not mention it at all and I feel terrible about it but Hans Zimmer's music in this film is absolutely crucial. His score is so memorable. You can hear da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, anytime you're watching these movies. In fact too, this actually wasn't the first time he used this theme. This will also date me but when this movie came out and the score started playing, my dad and I both said hey wait a minute, that sounds like the theme from The Rock, the Michael Bay movie and that was also co-composed by Hans Zimmer but really if you wanna go back to when this theme started, go all the way back to Broken Arrow. Trust me, go and watch that movie, you will hear the pirates theme in that movie. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the most fun movies to watch from the early 2000s if anything for the last 20 years. You could put this on any time of the day and you would get a good fun time out of it. It hasn't aged badly in any way whether it's from how the characters interact with each other, the effects, the production design, everything is still top goddamn notch. The humor isn't immature, it's very well placed and it's got a lot of great jokes in it. This is the day that you will remember that you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow. If it wasn't already obvious enough, I'm gonna give Pirates of the Caribbean a curse of the black pearl, a seven out of seven. This is one of my favorite movies. Funny enough, actually, I've been talking about Johnny Depp getting huge off of this movie. So did Orlando Bloom. Despite not really being that good of an actor, he's all right, he's decent, but he's not like Johnny. Orlando is never gonna get nominated for an Oscar, let's be serious here. But from the early 2000s, like 2000, 2001 obviously with Legolas, to about 2007, Orlando Bloom had a really good run of roles that he didn't deserve, but got still because of his credibility and his box office draw. Kingdom of Heaven is one of my favorite historical movies and while he's not the best in it, he's still pretty decent. I would say it's actually probably his best performance and he was definitely hired because of how much he was getting from Lord of the Rings and Pirates. So with that done, I wanna thank my Patreon supporters. Thank you guys for having me watch this movie. I in fact actually watched all of them. Even watched the latter two, which I have been holding off for a long, long time. And I wish I had held off longer because they're shit. The Either way, Pirates of the Caribbean, Curse of the Black Pearl is a fucking fantastic movie. If you've never seen it, go to goddamn watch it. If you've already seen it, go to goddamn watch it again because it deserves to be watched. It's one of the best action movies that Disney, hell, one of the best movies that Disney's ever made. And part of me wanna wonders what they did to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride because the last time I went on it was just before 9-11. So 2001, I haven't been to Disney in 20 years. I wonder if they put a Jack Sparrow mannequin in there. I imagine they did and he probably just says savvy or dust dust, all those weird contradiction things. Anyways guys, that's all for me. I hope you enjoyed this review. If you did leave a like and if you're interested in more subscribe, now I'm gonna take my big old hat here and I will see you guys later. Thanks for watching the video. My name is Nitz and you might remember me from the animated cult classic TV show, Undergrads. It's been a while, but I'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all new movie, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. But we are still asking for your support. To see any and all updates about the upcoming Undergrads movie, be sure to check out and like the Bring Back Undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.