My views: 13
My love of this movie has a lot to do with my love of Disneyland, which I'm now going to attempt to explain as briefly as possible. My grandparents live in Southern California, and even though I don't, I'm very close to them and have gone to visit them a lot with my family. They love having us stay with them, but I think we can be a bit overwhelming to have around, so usually we give them a few days' break from us by spending some time in the Happiest Place on Earth. I have so many fabulous memories of Disneyland, from the days of Rocket Rods and no FastPasses to this past summer. I could go on for a long time about Disneyland, but the point I'm trying to make here is that I was excited, yet apprehensive, when I found out they were making a movie based on one of my favorite rides. As you can probably tell from the films that I've talked about so far, I'm not a big action/adventure fan, and I feared that a movie about pirates would be mostly fighting and explosions without much plot or character development. I have never been so happily wrong in my entire life.
Of course, I was delighted with the references to the ride, like the dog with the prison key, the skeleton drinking rum, and the song. But to my immense surprise, I found that it also had fantastic character development and an engaging plot. And lo and behold, there was even an interesting, well-developed female character! Granted, there's really only one (okay, possibly two), but that's infinitely more than I initially expected. Naturally, Captain Jack Sparrow steals the show, but there are several other characters who put up a good fight.
This movie is also a bit like Chicago for me from a moral ambiguity standpoint. I feel I can relate a lot to Will Turner as he struggles with the question of whether it's possible for his father (or, heaven forbid, Jack Sparrow himself) to be a pirate and a good man. It shows that there's good and bad in everyone, but some people let the bad take over and vice versa. I didn't really like pirates that much prior to seeing this (besides on the ride), but I kind of loved the ones in this movie, so when Facebook started offering Pirate, I changed my language settings and never looked back.
There was a time when pretty much all of my friends were obsessed with this movie, so I ended up watching it at lots of gatherings. I think part of the reason this happened is it was one of the few films other people my age liked that I didn't object to. In addition to having good characters and plot, the script is also incredible and quite quotable, and includes one of my all-time favorite movie lines: "Do you like pain? Try wearing a corset." Like The Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this was a movie I could reference without people looking at me like I was crazy.
By now, the Pirates of the Caribbean craze has faded. Part of the problem was they insisted on making horrible sequels. Since everyone loved Johnny Depp in this, I'm pretty sure the filmmakers thought that he was their only selling point and decided to put absolutely no effort into all of the other aspects that make this movie so wonderful. I could only sit through the second and third ones once each, and didn't even bother seeing the fourth one. But I keep watching this for many reasons, one of which is Disneyland. Now that they've changed the ride to include Captain Jack Sparrow and excerpts from the film soundtrack, the movie reminds me even more of Disneyland, and is always willing to transport me there for a couple of hours when I'm feeling sad. I also try to watch it on September 19 every year for Talk Like a Pirate Day. We're devils and black sheep and really bad eggs, drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
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