Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Special Edition

As the holiday season quickly approaches, so do the DVD re-releases and Hollywood cash grabs. The latest in line for the superlative money-grubbing treatment is Pirates of the Caribbean, a fine and entertaining family ride that the studio would obviously like to ride a little further. What they've done though is simply encased 2003's spectacular two-disc offering in a plastic wrapper with a so-called "lost disc." When the wrapper is removed, you don't end up with a cleverly packaged three-disc set, you end up with the original two-disc hard shell case and a thick paper case holding the aforementioned lost disc. Already this special release is unimpressive. What makes it more so is not so much the content of the lost disc but the brevity of it, clocking in at just over an hour, there is certainly not enough here to warrant re-buying the far superior Collector's Edition just for this add-on, and similarly it would be difficult to sell this lost disc as a standalone for the same reasons. Instead of re-summarising the film, let's stick to the new element, the lost disc, which brings the following special features into the mix: actors Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush discussing how they became their Pirates characters, a mini-featurette about the making of the miniature Interceptor (and blowing it up), uber-short docs on working with the monkey, the skeleton pirate invasion animatics used to create the preliminary rough working sequence for the film and a slightly longer "History of the Attraction" (about the Pirates ride). There are also several clips of on-set footage, though most play without explanation or voiceover, and a useless four-minute segment showing the film in various different language dubs. The last word? If you already own last year's two-disc Collector's Edition, you can hold onto your bones and skip this one. (Buena Vista)