You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

Still working on a full Pirates post, but I saw the movie again last night, and I wanted to address a complaint that I've seen in several places. It may seem like splitting hairs, but I see the situation so differently that I don't get this complaint at all.


No, there are not two "hamster wheels" in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. There are two devices which roll in some way with characters inside them, but they don't strike me as similar. In fact, when I first heard someone mention the "two hamster wheels" I didn't get what they were talking about at first because it never occurred to me to compare the bone cage and the mill wheel.

First, the bone cage only rolls for a few seconds before it stops and Will et al "lift it like a lady's skirt" and run with it like it's a Flinstone car. They've also spent a good deal of movie minutes before that swinging it and climbing with it. All the mill wheel does is roll. From the moment Will and Norrington step on it and it dislodges till the moment it (finally!) stops in the water and tips over. This lasts for several minutes and is a much larger piece of the action sequence than the five seconds of rolling that the bone cage does.

If there's any comparison to be made, I'd say the cage rolling is kind of a teaser for that extended rolling mill wheel sequence. If it were a line of dialogue, a screenwriter might call it a "whisper" scene - where a line is brought up early and then again later for a payoff. But then again, maybe Ted & Terry didn't see any similarity between the cage and the wheel either.

I'm not trying to say that the film doesn't have its flaws, but I just don't think this is one of them.