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.
0 kommentar(er)
