BOOK VS MOVIE: Pirates of the Caribbean?

Tim Powers' fingerprints aren't just on the fourth movie of the blockbuster franchise...

Crank the clock back to July of 2003. I’m 19, and my 16 year-old brother and I are laying tile on a project house for our parents in the mind-melting heat of Las Vegas. Little Bro is extra tired after a bunch of his friends snuck out at midnight to see this new pirate movie because the trailers looked cool.

He proceeded to spend the entire day talking about Captain Jack Sparrow, recounting his antics from title card to end credits, which is something he never does. I figured this movie must have made a heck of an impression on him, he’s usually too terse to go on like this.

As millions of people would do, I headed to the theater that night to check the hype, and boy did it deliver. The Curse of the Black Pearl was the runaway hit of 2003, and it left everyone wanting more.

We’d get more. More than we wanted or needed, that was for sure. To date, fans are still arguing whether there is just one film in the series, or if the next two sequels exist, but the one thing we can all agree on is that four and five shouldn’t have been made.

But what if the fourth movie, On Stranger Tides, heavily influenced the first three? Or more accurately, what if the 1987 novel ON STRANGER TIDES was a buried treasure chest of source material for these films?

A fourth Pirates movie was announced in 2009, and as a huge fan of the trilogy, I was very optimistic. When I heard it was based on a book, the excitement swelled. I grabbed a copy off of Amazon (coincidentally I ordered it alongside MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL, triggering a whole other obsession) and burned through the pages.

To say that Tim Powers doesn’t write Disney screenplays would be underselling it. His approach to historical writing involves learning every fixed fact that he can, and then only writing fiction in between what actually happened. So when he pens a tale about Captain Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch plunging into the swamps of Florida to find the Fountain of Youth, well…yeah. Powers’ adherence to history makes an intriguing case at the very least.

But let’s back up a step—we’re talking about the Disney films, right? What does Powers’ book have to do with the first three, if it was the basis for the fourth? Well, I don’t have sources for all of this, just a long chain of coincidences, and the universe is rarely so lazy. So let’s take a look at what went down in the 1987 novel, 16 years before the Black Pearl set sail. What we find at world’s end may surprise you…

The Story

A Frenchman named John Chandagnac (“Shan Dan Yack”) is sailing from Europe to the Caribbean in search of his uncle, who is reported to have robbed his father of all his wealth and left him to die of either cold or starvation. Before John makes it to Haiti, the ship he’s on is captured by pirates and he’s pressed into service under Captain Phil Davies.

After an escape attempt goes awry, John (now called “Jack Shandy” by the sub-literate pirates who can’t handle his French name) is connected to the crew for the long haul. As it turns out, they’re headed to meet up with Captain Blackbeard off the coast of Florida, and they needed the ship that was carrying “Jack” and a bunch of other passengers.

One of these passengers is a comely young woman named Elizabeth. (Are you starting to notice something here?) Her capture is more than coincidental; she’s meant to be the vessel of resurrection for her late mother, a cruel design inflicted upon her by her deranged father. Unbeknownst to him, Captain Blackbeard has other plans for Elizabeth, as does a third party, a man named Leo Friend who has a crippling oedipal complex.

If that’s not tricky enough, Jack and Elizabeth have taken a liking to each other, and he sees fit to rescue her from her grim fate. He just has to learn the arcane craft of vodun first, so that he can contend with powerful sorcerers like Davies, Blackbeard, Friend, and Elizabeth’s father.

And this is before he even gets to the bottom of what his uncle did to his dad.

There is a LOT going on in this book, but for what it covers, it does so at a quick pace. Even the slower moments fill in the gaps in the worldbuilding, helping the reader to get his bearings before a new action sequence starts to roll. Much like the Disney films, this book keeps you interested. There are:

—Zombie skeletons

—Corrupt British naval officers

—Powerful storms

—Vicious natives

—and everything else short of gargantuan sea monsters than you might expect from a fantastical Caribbean pirate tale.

The Characters

While “Jack Shandy” might ring a bell, he’s not exactly a Jack Sparrow type; his character, as written, has more in common with Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner. He’s earnest and virtuous, though his primary skillset—oddly enough—is puppetry, not blacksmithing.

The Elizabeth from the book is a damsel in distress, but shows far less initiative than her screen counterpart, played by Keira Knightley. For the first two acts of the book she’s basically a McGuffin but by the end, she takes a more proactive role.

Philip Davies was a fictional character invented for the book, and for my money he comes off as a younger version of Barbossa from the film—he hasn’t yet double-crossed Jack and taken the Pearl. In fact, Davies and Shandy are good friends by the end of the story.

But while Jack Shandy is the “everyman” through whom we view the protagonist line of the story, perhaps no figure generates greater interest than that of Thatch, aka Blackbeard, who was a true 18th-century buccaneer. He sailed, he plundered, he killed, and he sought the Fountain of Youth. He was married a ridiculous amount of times, and Tim Powers finds a way to explain why within the confines of the worldbuilding. Ian McShane’s portrayal of the character in the 2011 movie was entertaining, sure. At that point I had already read the book twice, and the screen version of him just couldn’t stack up. The man was an absolute force even without the voodoo magic that Powers gave him.

The World

Given Powers’ aforementioned adherence to fact, this is our world, in the year 1718. There are specific references to then-current events, and some shallow splashes into practices and customs of the day. Powers paints on a canvas with quick strokes that color the scenery without wasting time on boggy minutiae.

In an interview on YouTube some years ago, it came up that he was inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland when he was a kid, and that sparked the interest that would lead to this book decades later. Funny then, that it would come full circle, and his book would fuel several key turns in the film series.

On that note…

What The Movies Had From The Book

You’ve got your Jack. You’ve got your Elizabeth. You’ve got your store-brand Phil Davies, your skeletons and your voodoo priestess. Ah, about that last one…

Tia Dalma, portrayed by Naomie Harris in the films, is an “Obeah woman” who has vaguely undefined sea powers, including the ability to resurrect anyone who dies in the ocean. (We find out later that she’s the sea goddess Calypso bound in human form.)

While this character didn’t appear in the book, there was a bocor named “Woefully Fat” or “Grievously Fat” who played the same role; he was a black man with very powerful vodun magic, allowing him to see into the souls of people around him and know their past, even though he appeared to be nothing more than a deaf fat man.

Personally I don’t think Tia Dalma was created as a Hollywood version of Woefully Fat, although she serves a few of the same purposes. My analysis of her character in 2020 shows that she played a much more profound role in the second and third films, and that basically every other major character’s actions were connected to her.

(Fun side note: Harris’ mother is Jamaican, and she brought her on set to teach her how to speak with the aggressive patois she used in the films. Naomie’s real accent is London English.)

Perhaps the most flagrant scene from the book that made it into the movies, though, was the wedding between Elizabeth and [Hot Male Protagonist] right in the middle of a battle. 2007’s At World’s End had Elizabeth Swann marry Will Turner on the deck of the Black Pearl, even as the ship circled a whirlpool and repelled boarders.

ON STRANGER TIDES had Elizabeth Hurwood marry Jack Shandy [basically the same character] in the middle of a swordfight. I will not explain how or why because you will read this book and enjoy it. It’s a plot-critical moment. The film version, while also relevant, didn’t have as direct an impact on the goings-on in the fight. I have to imagine that got Powers’ attention when he saw it on screen, 20 years after his novel came out.

Did Disney Crib Too Much?

It’s hard to watch the first three movies, then read this book, then ignore the similarities. When I finished my first reading of it in 2010, I chewed on it for days, and my writer-brain supposed that the screenwriters for the films must have been familiar with it. According to another interview with Powers, Disney had optioned his novel right around the time the second and third movies came out.

Yet by the time they finished At World’s End, there wasn’t much left in the tank, and a full-on adaptation of ON STRANGER TIDES would have lacked some of its most critical elements.

One particular element is the actual flag of Captain Blackbeard. Historically it depicts a horned human skeleton with a spear hovering over a heart emblem. There are various renderings of it online but if you search for “Blackbeard Flag” you can find several similar images.

If the fourth Pirates movie was trying to establish Blackbeard as “the pirate all pirates fear,” then it made little sense for him to appear at the massive naval battle from At World’s End. Yet when ‘Pirate King’ Elizabeth tells everyone to “Hoist the Colours,” the historic Blackbeard Flag appears several times in the background.

He was there, as just another ship in the fleet, armed with voodoo magic that nobody else had? Seems like this strategic advantage could have come into play during the fight.

More likely the directors and prop-makers for At World’s End had to create a lot of flags for an iconic scene, and relied on popular imagery to get the feel right. Then fast-forward four years, and you’ve got to retcon some things for a fourth movie with different writers. This is the flag they invented for Blackbeard in On Stranger Tides:

It’s a minor point, yet it’s always stuck in my craw, like a popcorn kernel that you can’t ignore. But then, Disney likely counted on the majority of moviegoing audiences having read fewer books on pirate history than I have.

Conclusion

If you enjoyed the Pirates films and thought there was room for a more cerebral take on the subject matter, your best bet is ON STRANGER TIDES, by Tim Powers. I think it definitely had an impact on the screenwriters, and I’m okay with that because it gave the book a new lease on life in the late 2000s. I’d never heard of the novel before the movie.

Content

Strong horror elements and combat violence, profanity, sexual references.