In the interim between the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Lord Beckett has declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, suspended the rights to trial and representation, and set about executing insurgents—oops, I mean pirates or anyone suspected of knowing a pirate.  There.  Now you have the social commentary from At World’s End.

If you’ve seen the first two films in the series, you should know what to expect in the latest iteration.  Sea battles, sword fights, switching allegiances between characters, betrayal, Johnny Depp being wonderfully weird, great special effects.  They are all here again.  And at a bit under three hours, there are lots of them all.  (And you need to be there the whole time, even through the interminable credits, to get to the final scene.)  This installment serves to wrap up the PotC series.  The story is brought to a conclusion.  It could be that there are ways to tell more of the story, but after this it would be a stretch.

I’ll skip the plot summary, because it would take far too long to untangle everything.  Besides, I’m not sure the movie manages to get everything untangled; but then, it’s a summer movie: we go for the visceral thrills more than to stimulate our minds.  And the film counts on us being happy with the fun parts, so it doesn’t pay attention to the more cerebral aspects.

The film does however have a veneer of intellect.  It offers us a chance to consider immortality. The film’s subtitle, At World’s End, has a certain other-worldly implication.  In the opening scene of mass hangings in Beckett’s anti-pirate campaign, the condemned start singing a song with the ending line, “never shall we die.”  That idea of not dying keeps playing out through the film.  There is a bit of end times contemplation to the film.  It isn’t really dealing with the idea of heaven or hell, but rather the value of life as it is lived as opposed to immortality.

When we find Jack Sparrow in the film, he has been consigned to a sort of Sartrean hell cum Being John Malkovich.  After his rescue, he discovers that whoever kills Davy Jones would have to take over as captain of the Flying Dutchman and sail the seas forever.  The idea appeals to Jack. He loves the sea.  He wants to be immortal.

We also learn that Davy Jones has lost sight of his purpose.  He wasn’t supposed to be terrorizing sailors.  It was his job to ferry those lost at sea to the next world—a kind of seagoing Charon, who in Greek mythology ferried the dead across the river Styx to Hades.  That immortal job carries a heavy price, spoken of in the previous film: that he can only go ashore one day every ten years to see the one he loves.  To be immortal, as it is seen here, is to give up on real life. Whoever would kill Jones and take his place would have to pay the same cost.

While Christians may speak of eternal life (and look forward to the gift of that life), it should never been seen as something that discounts the life we have now.  The final tag after all those credits gives us a little look at how valuable our present lives are and that we need to cherish the life we have.