One of those challenges about producing film trilogies themed on fantastic premises is coming up with story arcs to string and relate the three films together. Ideally, you’ll want to write the entire story for the three films first before even making the first one, rather than make a film with only very loose ideas about where to go from there and suddenly realize that you have lots of backtracking and corrective exposition to do after the fact when the first film turns so successful studios demand sequels.
Film trilogies like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) are lucky in this respect: their stories were written for the printed word first, so the films just need to follow the original text close enough and the audiences can then sufficiently draw relation between the films to see the continuity from one to the next. We also had The Matrix trilogy, which only casually introduced overarching story points in the first film and left it to the second and third films to actually flesh them out. And then we had the Star Wars original trilogy, which I thought was the worst offender of “making it up as we go along”, enjoyable as the three films to me were. I’m thinking specifically of Obi-wan Kenobi’s claim to Luke Skywalker that Vader “killed his father”, to which he could only clarify as “in a manner of speaking” in the third film when it’s established Vader was Luke’s Lao Pei.
I felt the Pirates trilogy was somewhere in in effect between LOTR and The Matrix in this regard, and it’s something I’d mostly missed in the original viewings. In my revisits on Blu-ray, I now noticed there were numerous references in the first film to significant story points in the second and third films, and winningly, those references weren’t just casual. For instance, the legend of Bill ‘Bootstrap’ Turner is solidly explained in the first film, which the next two films properly follows-up on, as is also Sparrow’s ownership of the Black Pearl and constant cycle of experiencing mutiny with his crew and island marooned. Another example: why Barbossa was brought back from the dead by Calypso in the second film is revealed in the third.
The net effect of properly establishing numerous story arcs that are introduced early and resolved later really made for a better sense of continuity and cohesion between the three films, though as these fantastic adventures go, there’s still a lot of belief suspension needed on its sensibility. For instance, after the third film I’m still wondering what exactly was Calypso’s reaction to being freed by the fourth Brethren Court aside from the maelstrom that she coughed up. Or the inconsistencies surrounding the prowess of the Flying Dutchman’s ship and crew: is the ship indestructible and the crew immortal for them to have easily swept through the opposing pirate fleet – shown early in the last film – but somehow seemed more vulnerable in the climatic fight at the film’s end.
Concluded in the next post.:)
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