The announcement of a new Pirates of the Caribbean film could have been another instance of franchise fatigue, but the news that this is a female-led reboot starring Margot Robbie and written by Birds of Prey screenwriter Christina Hodson has me intrigued and already thinking of theories. According to The Hollywood Reporterthe new film is not directly a top of the long original series, which means that there is more space to create something interesting and to regain the fun that made them popular in the first place.
Seeing the original The pirates the trilogy was a formative part of my tween years, and it is that nostalgia that keeps me invested, even the most recent movies have been huge disappointments. Where the later films comes to the cookie-cutter fantasy and became the Captain Jack’s Wild Ride, more than anything, the original trilogy was full of colorful adventure, and, surprisingly, in three dimensions, morally murky characters that were very rare in the world of fantasy that had consumed me until then.
Front and center, of course, was Elizabeth Swann, the type of heroine that rarely saw growing up and still are seen very rarely, even now, over 15 years later. She was a woman whose curiosity was rewarded, which was not relegated to the role of caregiver, and who rescued others with such frequency as is necessary to rescue. I always loved that she came to be deeply romantic without the definition of your character or to undermine the fact that she was also a total badass and one of the shrewdest people in all of history; it came to be both (no need to be a villain or oversexualized, no less), and there was no doubt about it. And she was not the only one! Surprisingly, for a story about a bunch of amoral, especially the male of the pirates, the trilogy, in large part, did OK for its female characters, which gives us the minor characters as Anamaria, Ching Shih, and Tia Dalma, who all, in most part, to avoid “the action hero girl” stereotypes.
If that is what an all-male creative team managed back in the early 2000, I can’t wait to see what a women-led team can do now! These are just some of the arguments that, in theory, it could happen in the reboot. What would you like to see in a The pirates restart the centering of women?
