I know most of the world agreed with me, so this is hardly a stunning insight: The Curse of the Black Pearl worked so fantastically because it was a logical extension of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme park ride. It was fun. It leveraged sanitized, stylized, even animatronicized pirate myths.

Dead Man’s Chest followed largely—yes, largely—in those footsteps. Even though it was darker, longer, and more plot-laden, it was still wickedly fun, often hilarious in a self-consciously vaudevillian way, and a logical extension of Black Pearl. One could imagine an expanded theme park ride based on Dead Man’s Chest—and it wouldn’t have been so out of line with the original ride.

At World’s End has almost nothing to do with Disney’s Peter-Pannish man-child pleasing theme park ride. These Pirates have got all grown up, had their varnish cracked and their canvas ripped, and have become true buccaneers. That’s either good news for moviegoers or very very bad news for the bean counters.

At a metaphorical level, in fact, At World’s End is about navigating into uncharted cinematic pop-culture waters, about looking gleefully into the unknown at the edge of the precipice—and sailing over with the wind squarely at your stern. It’s also, less metaphorically, about the ways in which Big Business stifles freedom (artistic or otherwise). And who do you think wins in the end: the East India Trading Company, or the pirates? Still, will director Gore Verbinksi and company achieve immortality with this intended coup de grace? Or can you really call it immortality when you pluck the heart out of your art and put it in a corporation’s lockbox?

At World’s End picks up more or less where Dead Man’s Chest left off: Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann, Captain Barbossa, and company are led by sorceress Tia Dalma on a quest to bring Jack Sparrow back from Davy Jones’ Locker. (That is, as with Barbossa, bring Jack back from the dead.) Lord Beckett, meanwhile, has pressed Jones into the service of the East India Trading Company to crush pirateers worldwide.

So the film abandons the Caribbean altogether as Barbossa gets his crew “really lost” so they can find Jack and the Black Pearl, as the Pirate Brotherhood marshals its forces in the Indian Ocean to resist Big Business, as Davy Jones plots to retrieve his heart from Beckett, as Jones and Barbossa both connive to reconnect with lost loves, as Jack Sparrow pursues the Ultimate Freedom of immortality, and as Will and Elizabeth strive to navigate the tricksy currents (and epically dense plotlines) that sweep them along. Oh—and there’s that pesky issue of whom Elizabeth will end up with, too.

All of that, of course, is more or less to be expected. Check your other expectations, however, at the theater door.

The story of World’s End is so complex—and so daring, in a way—that to say much more about how things work out would require a short novel and would destroy what the filmmakers intend as a dinghy full of little surprises. But in general terms, here’s a few things that might have you falling out of your seat: it’s not just Barbossa who acts like a real pirate this time out; one of the film’s major set pieces greatly resembles an abstract, extended, crab-filled European car commercial; another feels surreally like a Spike Jonze celebrity-fantasy featurette; still another longs to invoke the weight and bathos of Once Upon a Time in the West, though the film is set in the Far East; and if you belly-laugh more than three or four times, you’ll be doing so because you want to, not because the film asks you to. And whatever uninformed notions you might have about character arcs will almost certainly be confounded.

Even if Pearl and Chest tickled your fancy, as they did for me, there was no getting by the fact that those two movies were really nothing but summer blockbuster puffery. They might have been satisfyingly high-tech, but they were not High Art. In training his gunsights on self-referentially weighty metaphor, however, Verbinksi has achieved what I had certainly not expected: World’s End is actually a Good Film. Whether one enjoys it or not—and I didn’t, particularly, because watching it was too darn much work!—the experience is rather like spending nearly three hours studying a riveted and armored butterfly as it emerges from its softer, kinder chrysalis.

This is bold, bold filmmaking—almost what you might expect from an independent filmmaker with a corporate master and a $250 million budget, if such a thing were possible: almost, that is, what you might expect from a rule-breaking immortality-seeking pirate whose heart is held at gunpoint by the East India Trading Company. And Disney, like Lord Beckett, has taken a huge risk by entering into such a pact with that scoundrel Verbinski.

Think about that—about Disney’s flagship franchise defiantly flaunting summer-blockbuster audience expectations—as you watch Beckett’s final scene. And as you leave the theater after having slogged through all the end credits just so you can see the film’s true conclusion, ask yourself: Do you really have the energy or desire to sit through that again?

The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest, less accomplished films though they may have been, were more fun to watch—and more fun to think about having watched.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of action/adventure violence and some frightening images.” So were the first two movies. But this film is by no means—and I mean by no means—kid-friendly. It’s too long, too humorless, too adultly suggestive, and far too morally ambiguous for all but the most mature youngsters to sit through on their own. By all means, watch this film with your pre-teens if you’re so inclined, and talk through some of its very intriguing spiritual, philosophical, and artistic gew-gaws. But whatever you do, don’t think this one is as “safe” as its predecessors.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of At World’s End.