Pirates — Movie 2005

The answer, of course, is Raya. She'd have his compass, his ship, and his rum before he finished his first slurred sentence.

Ashworth and Raya are trapped in a mangrove swamp, their captured pinnace stuck in mud. Thorne’s frigate is closing in. Raya takes off her coat, ties a rope to a harpoon, and spears a passing crocodile. As the reptile thrashes, she says, "In my village, we call this riding the tempak ." Ashworth stares. "That's insane." She smiles—the first time she's smiled in the whole movie. "Yes. But he won't expect it." They are dragged through muck and shallow water, the frigate overshooting them by half a mile. It’s absurd, brilliant, and utterly believable. pirates movie 2005

But the Sunda aren’t empty.

The climax is a three-way battle in a flooded sea-cave. Ashworth uses the sloop's anchor chain as a whip. Raya fights with a broken oar. Thorne dies not by sword, but by irony: the porcelain jar shatters in the struggle, and a shard of it—just a sharp piece of ceramic—finds his throat. The answer, of course, is Raya

Thorne catches them at the reef. He doesn't want the letter. He wants to sink it. "A free Sunda," he says, standing on Ashworth's surrendered sword, "is a Sunda that sells to the French. To the Dutch. To anyone. I'm not a villain, Captain. I'm a grocer. And grocers hate chaos." Thorne’s frigate is closing in

The plot unfurls like a damp sail. Raya isn't after gold. She's after the Galuh Pusaka , a legendary galleon that sank in 1603 carrying the Tulang Naga —the "Dragon's Bones," a set of celestial maps that prove the Sunda Strait belonged to an independent sultanate, not the Company. Whoever controls the bones controls the sea lanes. And the Company’s man on the ground, the pale-eyed, soft-spoken Governor Thorne (Mark Strong, all velvet menace), wants to burn every native kingdom to the ground.