My daughter and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean on the weekend, and she drew this picture during the film. I think it's inspired by the scene where Jack Sparrow and Will Turner steal the Interceptor (the small ship) and are chased the the Royal Navy (in the big ship). The navy has launched a cannonball at them.
Part of my motivation for watching Pirates of the Caribbean was because I watched The Ultimate Gift, a religiously inspired motivational movie. I won't spoil the ending (completely anyways), but at no point did the movie make me fear that the hero would not survive or would fail in his task. It never happened, and so the movie carried no emotional weight. It wasn't poorly acted, and I guess the poor directorial choices could ultimately be blamed on scriptwriting.
As I noted last week, I have not been exactly productive in my own creative writing, but I have been thinking a lot about what works from a plot development perspective. Back in the 1990s I freely admitted that plot was overated and wrote a few parking lot inspired anti-dramas. While I still struggle with coming up with plot devices that I feel are original enough, I do have a new found appreciation for how some of those parts add up to a good story.
Enter Pirates of the Caribbean. What I really like about these three movies is the interplay between the three lead characters of Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Elizabeth Swann, especially in the second and third movies where they appear to have set each one up with mutually exclusive goals. The initial goal of any good story is to introduce characters that the audience likes, something accomplished in the first movie. The opening sequence in Port Royal where Elizabeth and Will defend Jack's "honour" also established them as fiercely loyal to their friend. It is this loyalty, combined with our own love affair with these three, that the second and third movies play off. We like these characters and want them to succeed, but the plot has been developed in such a way that we sit awash in tension from knowing that should anyone of them achieve their individual goals, it will come at the expense of the other two.
As an audience, we want to cheer for the main character and the job of the author is to engineer situations that puts our feelings for the character at risk. Either we need to be afraid that the character will fail, won't catch the bad guy or won't win back his or her's lover, but better movies manage to add an extra layer wherein we are afraid that the character will succeed, but only by resorting to some action of which we disapprove. This is why we like films about pirates and anti-heroes; all of the visual cues of the character establishes them as bad guys, and a few will-placed acts of good faith early on wins our trust. The rest of the movie is spent testing the audience with the notion that our trust was misplaced and given too easily.
