Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Set shortly after the events of The Curse of the Black Pearl, the film opens on a wedding that never happens. Lord Cutler Beckett of the East India Trading Company arrives in Port Royal with warrants for Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, and offers Will a bargain: hunt down Captain Jack Sparrow and return with his peculiar compass, and the charges disappear. What looks like a simple errand is really the first link in a chain of bargains that will bind every character in the story.

Jack, meanwhile, is running. Thirteen years earlier he struck a deal with Davy Jones, captain of the Flying Dutchman, and the bill has come due — a debt collected in souls and enforced by a leviathan. Jack's only hope is a legend: a chest, buried on a forgotten island, containing something Davy Jones once cut out of himself. Whoever holds it holds the seas.

From a cannibal island to a Caribbean swamp where the mystic Tia Dalma reads futures in crab claws, Gore Verbinski's sequel widens the first film's world into a supernatural mythology of oaths, monsters and merciless commerce. Old enemies resurface with new agendas, loyalties bend under pressure, and by the final act nobody's motives are quite what they appeared to be — least of all Elizabeth's.

At its heart, Dead Man's Chest is a film about debt — the moral kind. Its world runs on bargains: Beckett's contracts, Jones's hundred years before the mast, Jack's borrowed thirteen years, Will's promise to his father, Elizabeth's promise to Will. The film argues that freedom, the great pirate ideal of the first movie, is an illusion purchased on credit, and that every character is eventually presented with the invoice.

Verbinski also darkens the trilogy's moral palette deliberately. Where the first film had a clean line between heroes and cursed villains, here the villain is a ledger-keeping company man in a powdered wig, the monster is a heartbroken lover, and the "good" characters lie, manipulate and kill to survive. The message is that the heart is the price of power: Jones literally cut his out to stop feeling, Beckett wants it in a box so the sea can be run like a business, and Elizabeth discovers that saving everyone requires her to do something she can never take back.

Was Elizabeth's kiss betrayal or heroism? The most argued-over moment in the trilogy. One reading holds that Elizabeth murders Jack in cold blood, exploiting his one moment of genuine courage — the fact that he came back — to save herself and the crew. Another holds it is the film's only truly heroic act: someone finally makes the hard sum that Jack has been dodging all film, and pays for it with guilt she carries into the sequel. A third reading, common among viewers who dislike it, sees the kiss as narratively convenient character assassination.

Commercially, it was a landmark. Released in July 2006, Dead Man's Chest shattered opening-weekend records with a US debut of roughly $135 million, finished with $423.3 million domestically and $1.066 billion worldwide, and became only the third film in history — after Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — to join the billion-dollar club, reaching that mark faster than any film before it. It was the highest-grossing release of 2006 and confirmed that a theme-park ride could sustain a blockbuster franchise, accelerating Hollywood's shift toward IP-driven, back-to-back-shot sequel trilogies.

Technologically, its influence is still visible. ILM's work on Davy Jones won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and introduced iMocap, a portable on-set motion-capture system that let actors perform in costume on location instead of on a stage. That approach — a full digital character built on a photographed human performance shot alongside the rest of the cast — became a standard route to the modern performance-capture creature, and Davy Jones was quickly canonised, appearing on Entertainment Weekly's 2007 list of favourite CG characters.

Critically, it was the moment the franchise's reputation split from its receipts. Reviews were decidedly mixed — the film sits in the mid-50s on the Tomatometer — with praise for Depp's performance, Nighy's Jones and the set pieces, and complaints that the picture was overstuffed and overlong, lacking the easygoing, organic charm of the original. Culturally, it nonetheless cemented Jack Sparrow as one of the defining screen characters of the 2000s and made the tentacle-faced Jones an instantly recognisable Halloween and merchandising icon.

The split verdict. Audiences turned out in unprecedented numbers — the record-breaking opening and $1.066 billion worldwide gross made it the biggest film of 2006 — while critics were far cooler, leaving the film in the mid-50s on the Tomatometer. The critical consensus was that for all its inventive effects and exciting set pieces there is simply too much in this chest, and that it lacks the loose, organic charm of The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Most praised: Bill Nighy's Davy Jones, almost universally singled out as a great screen villain whose humanity survives a full digital face; the Oscar-winning visual effects and the design of the Flying Dutchman's crew; the three-way sword duel on the runaway water wheel; Hans Zimmer's score; Depp's still-fresh comic timing; and Stellan Skarsgård's quietly heartbreaking Bootstrap Bill.

Most criticised: the near two-and-a-half-hour running time and cluttered plotting; the cannibal-island sequence, faulted both for padding and for its caricatured natives; Orlando Bloom's comparatively bland Will; and the decision to end on an unresolved cliffhanger, which many viewers experienced as half a film sold at full price.

Most divisive: Elizabeth's kiss and the chaining of Jack to the mast. It remains the franchise's most debated scene — celebrated by some as the moment she became genuinely interesting and condemned by others as an unearned betrayal of both characters. The resurrection of Barbossa in the final shot, by contrast, is one of the trilogy's best-loved crowd-pleasing moments.