10 Movies That Explained Way Too Much
6. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Dead Man’s Chest isn’t a great sequel for a few reasons. But one detail of that movie is just so indicative of how the charm of the first film started to get pushed out of the ensuing films in order to provide a more epic, almost Tolkien-esque narrative.
In Curse of the Black Pearl, Captain Jack Sparrow has a compass that does not point north. It’s a quirky detail, perfectly fitting with a character who is never completely on top of things, but somehow manages to come out on top anyway. In the first film, it’s a fun unexplained detail that Captain Jack is a captain who somehow gets where he needs to go with a compass that does not point north.
In the sequels, this compass turns from a quirky object that’s fitting with Jack’s character to a powerful magical artefact that eventually takes on mythic importance. The problem here is that what was a silly detail that helped add charm to a silly but charming story becomes a tremendously dramatic, important, mythic artefact and, in the translation, something gets lost.
It’s a small detail, but it’s indicative of the kind of switch in tone that was made between Pirates 1 and 2. A quirky silliness that added so much fun to the original starts to get converted into attempts at epic fantasy, irreversibly charting a course for the franchise away from its entertaining start point.