When the Magic Kingdom first
opened in 1971, there was one Disneyland attraction that was conspicuously
missing: Pirates of the Caribbean. According to park lore, this was done because it was initially believed that
Floridians would be less charmed by pirates thanks to their proximity to the
Caribbean itself. This turned out to be a miscalculation as one thing became
clearer over the years: that everyone loves pirates. Disney World would get its
Pirates ride in 1973, and nearly five decades later it and its brethren in
Anaheim, Paris, and Shanghai remain some of the most popular attractions Disney
has to offer. There is something undeniably appealing about the adventurous
lifestyle that these rogues lead, but who were they as people? What is the
truth behind the legends? Netflix’s new docuseries The Lost Pirate Kingdom wants desperately to give viewers these answers,
but just might end up making them seasick instead thanks to its laughable
reenactments, mind numbing repetitiveness, and lack of good history.
An ugly hybrid between documentary
and historical drama, The Lost Pirate
Kingdom is an absolute chore. The talking heads are periodically
interrupted here by bad actors in bad costumes who try their darndest to
conjure up the high seas excitement
of a Pirates of the Caribbean film, all the while
accompanied by a score that sounds like discount Hans Zimmer. These
reenactments are not entertaining, nor are they necessary, as everything the
actors do and say is just a repeat of what the historians themselves said five
seconds ago. And speaking of unnecessary, this documentary is R-rated. As in,
there are multiple f-bombs and more than one topless prostitute. Why? Because
this is Netflix, and our documentary is going to be spicy, dammit! If The Lost
Pirate Kingdom would have worried less about being a
gritty low budget Pirates of the
Caribbean movie then it
would have had more time to show some actual historical depth, but as it is the
information conveyed is shockingly shallow. What was the War of Spanish Succession
and what did it have to do with the rise of piracy in the eighteenth century?
Don’t worry about it! Here’s a love scene between Sam Bellamy and a woman that
may have not even existed!
This leads me to the other gripe
that I had with The Lost Pirate Kingdom—the passing off of speculation and
hearsay as fact. If there is one thing I have learned about the pirates of the
Golden Age in my reading throughout the years, it’s that their history is often
very difficult to nail down because men like Blackbeard and Benjamin Hornigold were not
exactly the diary-keeping types. Historians have to fill
in a lot of blanks, and this series does a very poor job of acknowledging
that. If you do not have some prior knowledge of these people and events
already then it will be impossible to know what is
historical fact and what
is historical speculation.
Skip this one and get your pirate
fix elsewhere. I personally recommend The Republic of
Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the
Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard (who happened to be
one of the talking heads in this series). Here in The
Lost Pirate Kingdom, there be only
monsters.
The Lost Pirate Kingdom is
now available on Netflix.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on April 2nd, 2021.
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