Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — Characters & Cast

Self-preservation, and beneath it an almost metaphysical terror of death and the loss of his ship — the two things he cannot talk his way out of.

Begins as a fugitive improvising his way out of a debt he has spent thirteen years ignoring, and spends the film selling out everyone around him — including telling Jones he is "good with" condemning Will to eternal servitude. His arc is a slow, grudging turn toward conscience: he sails away from the doomed Pearl, then turns back. That flicker of decency is exactly what makes him vulnerable to Elizabeth in the final act.

To marry Elizabeth and to save his father — two promises the film makes mutually exclusive.

Coerced into hunting Jack to save Elizabeth, Will instead finds his father Bootstrap Bill fused to the Flying Dutchman and acquires a second, competing vow: to free him. Torn between fiancée and father, he hardens from earnest blacksmith into someone willing to scheme, steal and lie — and his defiant "I choose my own fate" is answered by the plot with steady irony.

Freedom and the survival of the people she loves — pursued, by the end, at any moral cost.

The film's most radical transformation. She escapes custody, dresses as a man, learns to lie, use a blade and read the compass honestly, and finally makes the coldest decision in the trilogy: she kisses Jack and chains him to the mast of his own ship so the Kraken will take him and the others can live. She is guilty, competent and unmistakably a pirate by the last reel.

To collect what he is owed and to keep his heart — his last vulnerability — beyond anyone's reach.

Introduced as pure horror and gradually revealed as a jilted romantic: he carved out his own heart to escape the grief and guilt of his betrayal by the sea goddess he loved. He harvests souls with bored cruelty ("Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different?"), yet the film's most devastating image of him is the moment he opens the chest, finds it empty, and screams Jack's name — a creature undone by feeling he thought he had removed.

To reclaim the rank, respectability and self-respect he destroyed.

Discovered as a drunken wreck in Tortuga, having lost his commission chasing the Black Pearl into a hurricane, he signs on with Jack's crew out of spite and desperation. He fights bravely, then makes a calculated grab for the heart during the three-way sword duel on Isla Cruces — choosing to buy back his old life rather than earn a new one.