I'll take "Pictures that give me random anxiety" for 5000, Alex.
Pirates of the Caribbean is a five-movie franchise, with a potential sixth on the way. While all five movies have their strong points, I tend to consider only the first three movies canon. Here’s why.
Note: These are only opinions; feel free to disagree. In fact, I’d love to hear your arguments against what I say.
The first three Pirates movies comprise a trilogy, with the last coming to a satisfying conclusion that effectively ends the series. With Elizabeth as the (presumably retired) Pirate King, Will as captain of the Flying Dutchman, Barbossa having commandeered the Black Pearl once again, and Jack setting out in search of magical treasure, it seems there is nothing left to say.
But still the series continues. On Stranger Tides, the fourth installment, just felt stagnant. Jack Sparrow was an ineffectual protagonist, as throughout the series he has little to no character development and requires a foil for his strangeness, which he didn’t have in this film. Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann were always meant to be the main characters, and with them gone, Jack as a character lost a great deal of his impact.
There was little that tied the film to its predecessors, in the way of minor characters or rules of lore or even just mentioning things that had happened in the past. The jokes fell flat. The action scenes felt gratuitous rather than exciting. The main villain, Blackbeard, never truly felt menacing enough for anything. Frankly, the idea of the Black Pearl in a bottle had no point beyond a throwaway joke and a needless obstacle.
Installment number five, Dead Men Tell No Tales, was entirely pointless. Except for a few humorous scenes and one single worthwhile action sequence, the rest of the film was a dismal flop. Several major contradictions were made to previously established canon (such as the origin of Jack’s compass), the lore became a grab bag of vague nautical legends, and none of the characters made any sense. Elizabeth was totally absent for nearly the entire movie, Will Turner became a hopeless, bitter old man, and Jack was nothing but a drunk pirate. There were no clever plans, no witty comebacks, and no high stakes. The villain was a waste of time altogether.
Furthermore, the plot of the fifth movie revolves around Will Turner’s son attempting to find the Trident of Poseidon in order to free his father from the curse that binds him to the Dutchman. But the entire point of the end of the third movie was that Will Turner was dead and Jack made him captain of the Flying Dutchman to save his life. Will’s heart is in a chest, so breaking the magic that binds him to the Dutchman would just kill him. And his obligation as captain wasn’t meant to be a curse—it was meant to be a sacred duty. The entire driving force behind the plot of Dead Men Tell No Tales makes no sense whatsoever, and it only destroys the credibility of the lore from the previous films. It ended up feeling more like bad fanfiction than a real movie.
In short, the fourth and fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movies do nothing to enhance the universe, the characters, or the storyline as a series. In most cases, they don’t even make sense in the context of the other films. As such, for personal purposes and most of these writing assignments, I consider only the first three movies to be canon.
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