Saw ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ yesterday. Got me some thoughts about it, but as you can expect I’m going to be talking about story details, so consider this your SPOILER WARNING. Don’t look further if you’ve not seen this movie yet.

Dead Man’s Chest follows on from the previous Pirates movie. The movie begins as Elizabeth and William Turner’s wedding is interrupted by the Royal Navy or some authority as they place them under arrest. However this is not just to uphold the law, it would seem the Commandant has ulterior motives. He blackmails Turner into going out to find Captain Jack Sparrow and retrieve his compass, that as you remember from the previous movie, didn’t work.

Meanwhile Captain Jack is in a whole WORLD of trouble as it seems he struck a deal with Davey Jones for 10 years of being a Captain of the Black Pearl in exchange for his soul (and 100 years of serving on Davey Jone’s ship). Of course Jack’s not all that keen to get going with this plan, so he’s trying to find a key that unlocks Davey Jone’s chest.

That’s as spoiler free as it gets people, from now on this really is your final warning. So anyway I really didn’t understand the reason why Davey Jones took his heart out and put it in that chest. I know SOMEONE mentioned something in the movie, but honestly it whizzed by so quickly I have no idea what the actual reason was, so if you picked this up, please do tell. I guess that’s one of my complaints about the movie. They had so much story to tell that someone was a bit asleep at the wheel when they went and edited this thing. Not much editing happened as far as I’m concerned. I could have done without the cannibals scenes or that whole ridiculous fighting scene on the spinning wheel thing. The whole scene with Elizabeth and the two other pirate monkeys on the beech was pretty cringe worthy as well.

The thing I will say however is that it’s Johnny Depp’s movie. I pretty much guarantee that if Jack Sparrow wasn’t in this movie, NO ONE would bother watching it, because to be blunt, everyone else pales in comparison to what the man does. His eyes and his facial expressions are spot on. The carefree way in which he’s constantly running around the screen is also really funny. He’s definitely got all the best lines and he’s the kookiest character of the lot, which means a lot really. He also claims the best scene in the entire movie, where he utters: ' Hello beastie'. Very cool scene.

Regarding the rest of the story, it was pretty standard fun with a great little ending with Barbosa making his return. Dunno how he did it but I’m sure they’ll be explaining it sometime next year when the third one is released.

I was particularly impressed with ILM’s effects on this movie, which seriously did showcase all that they can do with regards to integrating all sorts of things with the live action. From the destruction of various ships by the aforementioned beastie, all the way to Davey Jone’s octopus beard thingy. One point that I’d like to mention was the great use of colours in this movie. The apple eaten by Barbosa right at the end, to the costumes and the various beaches around the place, colour plays such an important part in this movie.

Better get comfortable, because you’ll need to be as the one thing that can definitely say about this movie is that it is LONG. It’s about 45 minutes longer than it really needed to be. There was a slew of sections in this movie that simply dragged on longer than I would have wanted. Ana mentioned it at the same time as me, because every time you thought it was going to end, it just kept going. Paradoxically, I have never yawned as much coming out of movie in my life. It’s not that I was bored or anything, probably just tired but it was very strange.

I did enjoy this movie, with the exception that I thought it was far too long in areas, but that’s the beauty of DVD, where I’ll be sure to fast forward those areas I thought stretched out too long.