Terry Rossio (who cowrote the film with Ted Elliott) said the following
here :
Davy Jones, as Captain of the Flying Dutchman, is cursed to set foot on land only once every ten years ... unless he finds a love that is true to him. Hopefully that rule will be made more clear in the third film.
If the person Jones had been in love with had been true, and waited for him, and stayed in love with him for ten years, upon his return to land his curse would have been lifted. That's a big part of the reason why Jones is so bitter and cruel. He had a chance to lead a normal life ... but his lover was fickle.
And
here Ted said:
That green flash was what Terry was referring to when he said it was possible, but very difficult, to figure out from the movie that the curse was broken.
There's also a good discussion/summary of all of this
here .
I have very mixed feelings about the movie in general, and about this ending in particular. I'm trying to put my thoughts in order before I make any final judgments, but coming out of the theater the other night I was very, very unhappy with the movie. It's grown a little on me since then, but that could be my desire to like it making me conveniently forget all the plotlines that went nowhere, the excessive weirdness and violence throughout, and the numerous times I simply (and
literally) threw up my hands in frustration <g>. [It didn't help that I saw it in the dirtiest theater I've ever seen, who saw fit to splice in their own intermission an hour or so in...]
Kaylle
