I'm trying to figure out the logic of the curse in Pirates, please help me. Spoilers

Cafe Society
1

Here’s what I have so far:

  1. The Astec gold was cursed because of what Cortez did to the Astecs.
  2. Anyone who physically took a gold coin from the box was cursed, including Bootstap Bill. There were 182 coins in the box, but not 182 cursed pirates on the Black Pearl, so obviously, some pirates took more. Those pirates who got none of the coins, were eventually killed off.
  3. As soon as the curse was detected (how?) and it was found out that Bootstrap Bill had sent a coin to his son, they sent him to the bottom of the sea.
  4. Bootstrap Bill was cursed as well, so he simply got free underwater, somehow, over the ten years, and walked to shore. So Bootstrap Bill is still alive somewhere. Unless he never did get free, and ended up drowning the moment the curse was lifted.
  5. In order to lift the curse, each of the pirates had to spill their blood into the box after putting their coins back in.
  6. Will Jr. and Jack Sparrow are brothers. This is because Will is only half blooded to lift the curse, another sibling’s blood would have been needed to make it full blooded. Jack cut his own hand when he tossed the coin to Will Jr., as did Will Jr, completing the blood need, and lifting the curse. This was all necessary because it was assumed that Bootstrap Bill was dead, and his blood was needed.

What I do not understand, is the very opening scene when Will Jr. was rescued from the ship that the Black Pearl destroyed. What was that all about? Was the Black Pearl hunting him down, and somehow miss him? Or was it a major coincidence that the Black Pearl destroyed his ship, and then sailed away, unsuspecting?

2

I did not consider the possibility that Capt. Sparrow and Will were brothers. Considering that Capt. Sparrow COMMANDED the Black Pearl before Barbosa led the mutiny against him… and that Bootstrap Bill was part of that crew… it seems unlikely somehow.

Although this begs the question of why Capt. Sparrow cut his hand.

Me, I was wondering why they needed Bootstrap Bill’s blood in particular. Wouldn’t the blood of any pirate who stole the gold be more appropriate than one who was penitent? Or, for that matter, the blood of someone who never even took the gold?

And precisely how did the MONKEY get to be undead? Guilt by association? Or did it swipe a coin, too? Like in the sting at the end of the credits?

3

Oh, never mind. Called my kid – the Pirates expert in the household – and she explained the whole thing.

The “price of blood” had to be paid by EVERYONE who took a coin from the chest. Presumably, every single pirate on the Black Pearl bled into that chest at one point or another…

…except Bootstrap Bill. That was why they needed his son.

Capt. Sparrow cut his hand at the very end before tossing the coin to Will so that he could pay his share, too. After all, he did take a coin…

…and defeating Barbosa and the Pirates at the end of the movie was suddenly VERY dependent on getting rid of that curse.

All of a sudden, it makes sense.

Although I find myself wondering if anyone ever cut the monkey over the treasure chest.

Just to make sure…

4

Oh, yeah, Sparrow did take a coin, didn’t he. That explains that.

But here’s a question, where did the pirates find the original box the first time. Did they stumble upon an island that no one could find, unless you knew where it was?

But what about the beginning flashback scene. What was the Black Pearl’s motivation to destroy that ship, and then sail away? What did the viewer just miss?

5

There were 882 pieces, not 182.

Jack and Will brothers? Inconceivable! :slight_smile:

The other pirates did give a little blood as well, presumably almost 10 years ago. It was quick, but as Barbossa is cheerleading the pirates before cutting Elizabeth, he says something like this: “And who here has paid the blood sacrifice owed to the heathen gods?” “We have!” “And whose blood must still be repaid?” “Hers!”

Jack’s compass is presumably how they located the island the first time. Barbossa asked for the location of the treasure, and Jack told him the bearings, and Barbossa mutinied. Will asked where Jack got the compass, and Gibbs told him that not much was known about Jack. So, I’m guessing somebody who had been to Isle de Muerte had charmed a compass and it became a magic artifact that Jack managed to come across in his travels.

In the opening scene, the Black Pearl had attacked Will’s ship because they were looking for the Medallion. That’s what Elizabeth assumed anyway, and I think it’s reasonable.

6

At one point in the film, I think Barbarossa said that the coins called to him. That is, if you were a pirate under the curse, you had some sort of sixth sense telling you where the missing treasure was. That was how they recovered all the other coins after all, and how they knew to attack Port Royal (after a few years of searching, of course).

7

Oh yeah, they went looking for the Governor’s daughter, because she had it. I just wonder why they sailed away so soon after destroying that ship. They hardly had a chance to look for the coin, and what if Will Jr. hadn’t have conveniently landed on that piece of wood.

Not that it would’ve mattered to cursed zombies, but Will Jr. and the coin would’ve gone to the bottom together.

8

How the pirates found the coins after they’d stolen them is the only thing that’s not entirely clear about the curse. Remember at the beginning, when Elizabeth faints and falls off the cliff, the coin makes some sort of a pulse in the water and causes the winds to shift. That night, the Black Pearl sails into port. Why it did that then, and not any time in the preceding ten years, is unclear. Perhaps it needs to be worn by a living person (when Elizabeth takes it out of her desk, it’s clear she hasn’t touched it in years: it leaves an outline in the dust in the bottom of the drawer). This would explain why the pirates attacked Will’s ship, and why they broke off when Elizabeth took the medallion: the connection was broken, and the Pirates assumed they’d accidentally killed Will. The problem with that it, the medallion doesn’t activate as soon as Elizabeth puts it on, it activates when she falls into the ocean and almost drowns. So, perhaps it’s either the (near) death of the wearer or the contact with seawater that activated the coin. But if that’s the case, how did the pirates know to attack Will’s ship in the first place, when he was assumedly neither dying nor immersed in seawater? It could be it was just a coincidence: the Black Pearl was preying on all Merchant-men in the area, and happened to attack the ship carrying Bootstrap’s descendent. Seems like a mighty big coincidence, though.

My guess is that the pirates can sense when the coin is being held by someone who owes the blood price: they could “feel” the gold so long as it was held by Will. When Elizabeth took the medallion, the link was broken, and the pirates sailed off. However, whenever anyone who owns one of the medallions but doesn’t owe the blood price dies, the coin “pulses” to let the pirates know that one of the coins is up for grabs again.

That’s the best I can come up with, anyway. The rest of the curse is pretty solid, especially for this sort of summer popcorn movie, so I assume that the writer had a definite idea about all this that didn’t make it into the final edit of the film. Sounds like good DVD material to me.

One good reason the pirates might have split instead of sticking around to search corpses: while the pirates are immortal and indestructable, the Black Pearl isn’t. Fighting the ship Elizabeth and her dad were on, especailly right on the heels of destroying that first ship, might have been enough to send the Black Pearl to the bottom, which would be a major inconvenience for the pirates, if not quite a fatal set-back.

9

I thought it was clear that the connection was that the coin only called to them in the water. That would explain why they didn’t find Will too, despite knowing his father sent him a piece of gold and somehow finding out that he was looking for his father on that ship. Since Will did end up on that convinient piece of wood, keeping the coin dry, they didn’t end up finding him despite burning up his ship.

As for #4, I wonder if that will be the subject of the second movie. (the TVguide reported last week that Depp, Bloom etc have already been signed for a sequel) Bootstrap had to have actually taken a coin, and thus be under the curse, if his blood was required to lift it- therefore he couldn’t have just gotten a coin from someone else(thus handling it like Will and Elizabeth could without being cursed) like a friend theorized. So it was the first question I had too once the curse was lifted- was Will’s dad now drown as soon as the curse lifted? I presume he was still at the bottom of the sea, since he never went looking for Will. That’s rather morbid for a disney movie, so he’ll probably turn up somewhere alive.

10

I don’t see why the Black Pearl would have not been as immortal as the crew. This leads into one of my pet peeves of this excellent movie.

Several times in the movie mortal characters, Will, Sparrow, would knowingly and repeatedly take up battle against these immortal foes. Why would they do that? The only option is to lose. That kind of bothered me.

Just because holes were being punched in the Black Pearl didn’t mean that it was in danger of sinking. Some of the crew had arms and legs ripped off, only to reattach them again.

I like your suggestion of how the curse worked. I agree with you that I feel that the length of the movie started to become a problem, and a lot of the explaining scenes got cut out.

The ripple and boom in the water? Not sure. It only happened once in the movie. Most other events repeated. But that just happened once, and didn’t make sense.

So, do you think Bootstrap is still alive?

11

I disagree. Recall the melee scene in Port Royal. We see a few of the pirates dispatched.

12

Well, for one thing the ship is not a living being. It also never personally took any gold out of the chest. On the other hand, it does seem to generate its own fog bank and is the fastest ship in the ocean despite having great, ragged tears in its sails, which seems to indicate a certain supernaturality.

Ah, there’s one other option: stand there and get hacked apart. Once the nature of the curse is revealed, Will and Jack spend most of their time trying to avoid fighting the pirates, albeit not very succesfully. It’s only at the end, when Jack hatches his plan to lure the pirates into combat with the British navy, that any of the heros seek out a confrontation with the pirates, and then only with the expectation of lifting the curse in the middle of the fight.

Yes, but we never see holes in the Black Pearl magically repairing themselves. Since this would have been an awfully cool visual, I assume the reason we never saw it happen was because the Black Pearl had no such ability.

Thank you!

Dunno. Really could go either way. I was half expecting him to show up through out the entire movie, especially the second time I saw it, when I waited through the interminable closing credits for the teaser shot at the end. It’s was just the stupid monkey, though. Thought that was really lame. Ooh! Undead monkey! Scary! What was the point of that? Setting up the big bad for the sequel?

Achernar: We see a few of the pirates take wounds that ought to be fatal. In fact, the very first pirate we see killed is the one with all the little hand-bombs, and he’s back up and walking around by the end of that fight sequence. The movie explicitly establishes that anyone who took gold from the stone chest is unkillable. Heck, Jonathan Pryce hacks off that one pirate’s arm, and it keeps after him until the curse is finally lifted. Even that pirate who took a cannonball in the chest is was probably up and running around within ten minutes or so.

13

Mm… in the melee in Port Royal towards the beginning, when Elizabeth is captured, we see several pirates dispatched… AND THEN THEY REAPPEAR, later in the same scene! Watch it carefully, and you’ll see that. Plainly one can knock 'em down, but they get up again, later.

The gold DOES call to the ghost pirates, as this is how they find Elizabeth when she’s hiding in the Governor’s Mansion. The pirates themselves explain this. I suspect it’s kind of a short range thing, though, and for the ten years the coin sat in Elizabeth’s drawer, gathering dust, it apparently wasn’t calling real LOUD, if you know what I mean…

…but once in the same house with it, they’d be able to find it, quick enough.

I’m assuming they attacked Young Will’s ship specifically to get the coin, and accidentally nailed the powder magazine during the attack. Ship goes BOOM, and the disappointed pirates figure they’re screwed, the coin’s somewhere at the bottom of the briny deep.

Hell, for all we know, they might have been wandering around on the bottom, LOOKING for it, for that ten years that we blithely skip over at the beginning of the movie, while the coin gathers dust in Elizabeth’s boudoir drawer.

Judging from the condition of the Black Pearl throughout most of the movie, I suspect it does not regenerate, the way the undead pirates do. For most of the movie, I was wondering how the hell the Black Pearl could be the fastest ship in the Caribbean with those tattered sails…

Throughout most of the movie, most of our protagonists either fight the pirates when they have no choice, and/or don’t know the pirates are undead and immortal. JACK is the one guy, aside from the pirates, who DOES know the truth throughout the entire movie… and he DOES start a fight with Barbosa, knowing full well Barbosa can’t be killed… but we also have ample evidence, throughout the movie, that Cap’n Jack Sparrow ain’t wrapped too tight. Of course, Cap’n Jack also has a rather clever ace in the hole, too…

Here’s a question, though: We know that Bootstrap Bill is cursed, because he took a coin, and sent it to his son.

We know that the pirates chained up Bootstrap and tossed him overboard, where he may well still be.

My first thought is that if Bootstrap is still on the ocean bottom, he’s screwed, because the curse is lifted at the end of the movie. He’d become mortal, and immediately drown.

…but WAIT! HE was the only pirate who didn’t give some blood to the treasure! His SON did, which allowed the OTHER pirates to lift their curse…

…but Bootstrap Bill never paid the blood price!

Could it be he’s the only remaining undead Pirate Of The Caribbean? Sitting at the bottom, waiting for his chains to rust through… and free him?

And could this wind up being in the sequel?

Hmm…

14

Quotes from above:
" Several times in the movie mortal characters, Will, Sparrow, would knowingly and repeatedly take up battle against these immortal foes. Why would they do that? The only option is to lose. That kind of bothered me.

Ah, there’s one other option: stand there and get hacked apart. Once the nature of the curse is revealed, Will and Jack spend most of their time trying to avoid fighting the pirates, albeit not very succesfully. It’s only at the end, when Jack hatches his plan to lure the pirates into combat with the British navy, that any of the heros seek out a confrontation with the pirates, and then only with the expectation of lifting the curse in the middle of the fight. "

Great answer, Miller - and not just because I was thinking it & couldn’t get it written coherently

15

I know you can’t kill the pirates. But that doesn’t mean you can’t win a fight with one. You could disable him long enough to flee or rescue his captive or steal his treasure or whatever your objective is. Savvy?

16

Here’s something that’s been bothering me, in spite of how much I loved this movie:

It seems to me that Jack Sparrow shot Barobossa just before the curse was lifted…the sequence as I recall it is that he shoots Barbossa, then tosses the bloody coins to Will Turner, who then drops them in the chest and the curse is lifted. So…considering that the undead pirates were regularly receiving what would otherwise have been mortal wounds while under the curse with no ill effects, and when the curse was lifted, they all seemed perfectly fine…why did Barbossa’s gunshot wound that he received just before the curse was lifted kill him?

And here’s another question…if all of the cursed pirates are really dead, then why are they all alive again after the curse is lifted? Once the curse is lifted, shouldn’t they just be regular dead rather than undead?

17

The way that I took the curse was that they were immortal, but miserable. The time that they spent cursed was equal to being lost time for them. They didn’t need to eat or drink, nor did they gain pleasure from doing so, they were immortal (undead, as a vampire) until the curse was lifted, then they resumed their ordinary lives. Not die afterwards, although I believe that Barbosa was alluding to the fact that death would be preferrable to their current situation, in one of his monologues. Please don’t ask for a cite.

18

I don’t know about Bootstrap still being cursed. I think that once the curse lifted, it lifted for all of the crew. But there does seem to be a hint of a plot hole there.

Everyone put their gold back in except Bootstrap. It wasn’t actually his blood, but his offspring’s blood that broke the curse for the crew. How do these factors effect how the curse works?

And, no, it was definitely quick and close, but Sparrow definitely cut himself, then threw the coin, then shot Barbosa. We just have to assume that it all happened just in the nick of time.

“Now bring me that horizon, and some rotten eggs.” Fade out.

19

Jadis - I think because they never died the first time, only slowly starved/dehydrated, they weren’t really dead when the curse lifted. After all, their whole plan depended on them getting the curse lifted so they could enjoy life (apples, women, grog) again, not so they could rest in pieces. As for Barbossa - when he recovered from the curse, the shot was still inside him.

I think the Pearl did suffer from the curse, too. After all, after the battle with the pirates and she was sorely hurt, she was still around to sail to Cap’n Jack’s rescue. I didn’t notice if, when the moon was shrouded, if her sails and rigging looked whole. Perhaps she only had the tattered look by the moonlight.

StG

20

The Black Pearl had tattered sails in the opening scene, which took place during the day.

Additionally, Jack said that after the run-in with the Interceptor, the Pearl was “listing” or some nautical term. It was disabled, at any rate. However, he may have just said this to convince Norrington to go after it.