 In 2003, Pirates of the Caribbean hit theaters and Disney found themselves a cash cow. Which is nice. It's rare when Disney makes a lot of money off of a film franchise. It's good that they got to win this one time only. They own everything now. One would presume then that Disney would take all that knowledge, that vast experience and really hone in on what made Pirates of the Caribbean so successful, and once again use it to create Jungle Cruise. One would presume that. Let's find out on another episode of Movie Feuds. Pirates of the Caribbean. Wow, what an adventure. What a story. One that I haven't heard told to me in quite some time. It's been well over a decade friend since I've seen this film, and man was I in for a treat. It's actually far better than I initially remember being in theaters. That's right, I've only seen this film one time. This is the second viewing for me. And you know why I think it was better? This has been happening a lot more recently for me. It's that movies are getting worse. It's entirely possible I'm hitting an age bracket where I think all music is too loud and the kids need to get off my yard with their ball and that movies just aren't like they used to be back in my day. I don't think that's the case though. I think The Mandalorian is the greatest star wars we've had since the originals. I think that the Disney Marvel films are fantastic. The main reason people are really drawn to the Pirates of the Caribbean is of course our friend Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp, killing it in the role, crushing it in the first appearance as a laissez-faire pirate who's drunk off his ass. You're not really sure if he's ever sober. He's a functioning alcoholic really, but he can swashbuckle with the best of him. And he's gonna have to because he's going up against a blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom. Orlando Bloom is familiar with the sword. He knows his way around a blade. I mean as a matter of fact he went on an extended journey with a bunch of hobbits so he held his own really well. Legolas is one of the greatest characters of all time. Will Turner not so much. He's a little bland, but he gets the job done. Keira Knightley however is Elizabeth Swan. Oh my god. She's just the full package. She's the real article here. She's a beauty on the eyes. The jawline. What a gorgeous. I'm just jealous. I don't have that structure. I don't have the bone structure. That's why I never could make it in Hollywood. That's what I tell myself. Not to be out bone structured as Emily Blunt as Lily. Her character is very headstrong. She's adventurous. She's essentially Rachel Weiss' character from The Mummy. Dwayne Johnson plays Frank Wolfe, who's basically Brendan Fraser's character, Rick O'Connell. Because when it really boils down to it, all the characters in Jungle Cruise are just characters from The Mummy. Hell, Lily even has her own Jonathan of the film, McGregor. He's the the doofus-y brother who likes to dress fancy and get in all sorts of hijinks. I have to circle back to Pirates though because we got plenty of more stars in this thing. Jeffrey Rush plays Barbosa, the villain of the picture. Jonathan Price plays the governor, aka father of Elizabeth Swan. You have the first appearance in the franchise of the dumb and dumber characters. One always loses his eyeball and in silly ways. And somehow Zoe Saldana managed to sneak her way on this ship too. I hope Zoe Saldana's agent's getting a really nice gift basket because damn that girl is in a lot of great movies. Very successful franchises. The number one highest grossing movie of all time, Avatar. The number two highest grossing movie of all time, Avengers Endgame, which also has a few more slots in that top 10 list by the way. She's in Guardians of the Galaxy. Hell, she's even in Crossroads with Britney Spears. And if there's gonna be any sort of claim to fame for her, it's gonna be Crossroads. That's a cinematic darling. Jesse Plimons plays a prince in Jungle Cruise, try saying that five times fast. And he's definitely my favorite part of the film. Paul Giamatti can be seen wandering the docks throughout the picture as well, trying to try to collect on what he's owed. You take Jack Sparrow off the table, you have a closer round, but I still think it goes to Pirates. Jeffrey Rush as Barbosa's awesome, he's a fantastic pirate. You got that love story between Will Turner and Swan. It's an easy win. Johnson and Blunt do have chemistry. I'll give them that much, but let's be honest. Blunt could charm the pants off you even when she was talking to a block of wood. She's that good. This round goes to Pirates of the Caribbean. I brought this up already, but Pirates of the Caribbean came out in 2003. How does it look so good still? My thought is that people cared a little bit more about the production they were working on. That's not to say Jungle Cruise looks bad. It looks very, very typical for Disney now. It's very colorful, lots of CG creatures going on, lots of people interacting with things that clearly aren't there, tons of green screen work that I don't think fools anyone anymore. When you see a person running out a tree and getting wrapped around by branches and thrown across the entire room and somehow lands and is fine, your disbelief is not suspended anymore. It's launched off into the stratosphere. It's long gone. Now, does Pirates look perfect? No, no, no, no. There's age on it for sure. There's age on those old bones. The CG is definitely showing. The thing is they wisely keep it at night and it's used sparsely. It's used creatively when the characters jump in and out of the moonlight. You see them transition on the spot from CG skeletons to people. It works really well. I mean, it played out, I'd say 90% of the time. I was really impressed by what was going on. Jungle Cruise plays with some CG characters too and it's really kind of done for no reason at all. These characters just seemingly show up at random happenstances. I know they have to stay by the river, but they dispose of these characters pretty easily and they only really seem to appear at just random times. It doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a snake dude. There's a bee guy. Everyone's got a gimmick. What about the music, though, Adam? Who wins in that department? You already know the answer, you son of a bitch. Sorry, that was really aggressive. Wow. Pirates, of course. The song is amazing. It's fantastic. I'm sure the music in Jungle Cruise was lovely and it worked for what it was doing, but it's nowhere near. It's nowhere near the epicness, the beauty that is Pirates of the Caribbean. This is another win for Jack Sparrow. You know, I picked these rounds, right? And the story is just not what I'm really interested in talking about, rehashing the story. I guess I don't need to go into a big synopsis. We can just do a very kind of top-level overview. I will say this about the Pirates of the Caribbean. There are times when it's hard to understand what some of the characters are saying because things are clinking and clanking and cannonballs are blowing through ships and swords are hitting against each other. You just miss things. So you can get lost pretty easy in this franchise. I'm only talking about the first, the later ones, I believe, they're just a cluster. They're just a complete disaster in the storytelling department unless you're really paying attention. But I will also say this. There is an interesting story in Pirates. There is a complex and fleshed-out storyline there and it begs you to re-watch to really get some of the nuance, some of the subtle hints to not only this film but future ones. For instance, Davey Jones' Lockers mentioned a few times. What the hell is that even? Well, I don't think audiences know at that point unless it's mentioned somewhere that I forgot. But no, I'm pretty sure this is just a cue to a bigger world, a larger world, and one that I guess they were confident enough to hint at. Jungle Cruise doesn't seem too intent on building this out to be a franchise and that's perfectly fine. That's admirable in its own right. Everything it seems nowadays wants to be the next great Avengers, you know? They want to have their own universe. So I guess it's fair that this one just kind of stays true to itself. It doesn't try to set up two more bridge films or a sidequel or a spinoff with the CGB character and how he really just loved Honey so much and that's why he had this ability. Both films start with a flashback. In Jungle Cruise's case, it's centuries, whereas Pirates of the Caribbean, it's just like, you know, 15 years, 12 years, something like that. We see a 12 year old Elizabeth Swan riding on her dad's ship when they spot a young Will Turner who's drifting a float on a raft. He's doing the whole Titanic thing. I guess there was room on this one. There was room for two on this. Well, then again, maybe he did a reverse to Caprio. Maybe he kicked the girl off and was like, there's no room. There's clearly no room for two. Will has a mysterious past at Turner's out. And yes, that was a playoff his name. It was a pun. Subscribe. The mystery revolves around his dad, who he was, what happened to him. And we find out by the end of the film, he was in fact a pirate. I'm getting too heavy into the plot. I need to back up. I don't want to break this down. I don't want to do that. I just want to keep it loose. Okay, I want to keep it floaty. The film is called The Curse of the Black Pearl because Barbosa and his crew stole treasure that didn't belong to them. I mean, that's what the definition of stealing is doesn't belong to you, but they stole from the wrong pirate. All right. So a curse was placed upon them that until they return the treasure and a blood sacrifice, they will be the walking dead. They will not feel feelings. They will not be able to eat eatings. They will not be able to love lovings. Some of the that didn't work. They're only one coin short of saying, I'm a real boy again. And that coin is a calling. And Elizabeth is the one that has it because she took it off of Will Turner's body when he was a wee one. Sorry, this movie's got a lot going on. Bruckheimer had a lot to juggle and he juggled it very well. Swan is taken across the ocean where she's going to be made a blood sacrifice along with the last coin being dropped in because they wrongfully assumed she was in fact the heir to Turner. Meanwhile, Jack Sparrow and his new friend Will have teamed up to try to save Swan. This is a fast-paced, fun, action-packed film for the whole family to enjoy. We have swash buckling. We have explosions. We got ship battles. I mean, we got everything on the high seas you could possibly ask for. Let's talk about Jungle Cruise now. Speaking of mysterious pass, Frank Wolf has one of his own. At first glance, Frank seems like your everyday run-of-the-mill skipper who's driving a Jungle Cruise for a bunch of tourists and who's gigantic in size to the point where it seems absurd for a human being to be that large. You know, one of those guys. But much like Barbosa, he too is cursed to only be on the river. He cannot leave it. He will always be pulled back. He just doesn't want to get too far back or he'll be stuck in vines for all of eternity like some of his cohorts. His boat's kinda crappy. He owes a lot of money to a guy and it seems like nothing's going his way until Lily shows up. Now, Emily Blunt's presence alone would be enough to sweeten some soured grapes, but that's not all she's bringing to the table. She has with her an arrowhead that looks like a rocky piece of shit, but in fact, it's not gonna be an arrowhead by the time this is all over. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You flip that thing over. It kinda looks like a heart. Wow. It's wild, isn't it? You see there's an old tale that has something to do with tears of the moon that when bloomed will be able to do all sorts of crazy things like maybe cure diseases or make you fly. I don't know. We don't know. We don't know the capabilities of the flowers, but we want to or at least Lily does. Lily's also the name of a flower, so I don't know if that has anything to do with anything, just coincidental, probably, but wanted to point it out. She and her brother seek out the help of Frank, who they're told is the best riverboat skipper around, his words. And he's right. As we see him pull off some amazing feats, such as dodging missiles underwater by a nearby approaching submarine and smashing through a building. Wait, yes, you heard me. Yeah, there's a submarine that's following them in this river. A submarine in the river is following them. Submarine. It's a zany adventure tale. Calm down. We're willing to suspend our disbelief. Lily stole an artifact from the wrong prince and he's pissed, so he's gonna be going after them, this whole film, as they traverse through some pretty steep conditions. We have running rapids, jagged rocks, waterfall drop-offs. I'm pretty sure I'm just describing one five-minute section of this movie, but it sounds really grand if I kind of split it up like that. He somehow used a vial to awaken some of the other magical beings that were trapped in the roots of the tree that they're trying to get to, so they're also going after them. It's a ride. Literally, it's a ride at Disney World. So which one of these rides is really worth waiting in line for? We're doing ride puns now. I think you know the answer. I was being heavily transparent on it. Pirates of the Caribbean, baby. We're in the conclusion section of this thing now, and I want to say, I don't think Junker Cruise is bad. I enjoyed myself with it. Will I ever watch it again? No, there's no reason to. It's a harmless film. It does a lot of the things we've seen in other franchises like Indiana Jones and, of course, The Mummy, and even Pirates of the Caribbean. But it just doesn't have anything new to say, you know? It doesn't really seem like they put a lot of care and effort into it. It looks nice, the acting is good, the action's fine, but it's all very just run-of-the-mill by the books. Pirates of the Caribbean, however, damn, that's a fun movie. That really looks good. Tons of practical sets, tons of practical effects when they can. I mean, you can just tell there was such a labor of love put into this movie, and I think that that stays the same going through the franchise. I'm really excited to dive into them more, and I will rank them all once I get through. So if you're interested in hearing my thoughts on the best and worst of the Pirates franchise, stick around the channel, subscribe, become a fan, become an avid watcher, and we'll go on this movie journey together. Or don't if you hated this, that's fair too. Why are you still watching, though? For a while I had a voting system where you could go on my community tab ahead of time, vote for your favorite, but I think instead I'd really just like to keep it to the comments. So let me know in the comments what you thought about Pirates of the Caribbean and the Jungle Cruise, if I'm right on the money or if I'm just completely off base, bias, have nostalgia glasses on for a film that I haven't seen in an incredibly long time and have no reason to have a bias towards it, but you can have that opinion, it's a stupid one, but you can have it. Leave those comments below, like the video if you had some fun, and remember, this is more than just reviews, this is Movie Feuds. Oh, you're still here. Thanks for sticking around. You must have liked the video or you left to take a crap and you forgot that this was playing in the background. Either way, that's fair. If you do like what I'm doing, like truly like what I'm doing here, maybe think about joining me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies. We have different tiers there starting at $1, so you could show, you could say, hey, Adam, you know what? 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