Of distressing times—and he lived through a few of those—George Orwell said that the first duty of a gentleman living in such dark days is merely to point out the obvious. To adapt that formula to the movie industry as it stands now, choking in a miasma of crapulence, “Pirates of the Caribbean” wins plaudits for promising and delivering on the obvious: story, character, dialogue, quality sets and costumes, and a general sense of knowing how to put all of these together. Nothing onscreen approaches greatness, but there isn’t anything particularly bad about it, either. In the motley family of summer FX monstrosities, ‘Pirates’ may be the plain sister, but she has no warts, and laurels have been awarded for less.

With its handsome cast and lush tropical locales it would be a disservice to call this movie plain, however. The screen is filled with interesting visual clashes. Dusted London-made wigs in balmy tropical coves, men who turn into skeletons in moonlight, a flat-chested heroine clad in a “ripping bodice”, a Jerry Bruckheimer film with only one slow-motion sequence—all a feast of contradictions for the eye. The actors were as well chosen for their noble comeliness (Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom) as for their oddly idiosyncratic appearances (every pirate save Johnny Depp, whose charms are evident even underneath that ratty makeup), creating a splendid mixture of the high and low that yields old-fashioned comedy unthinkable in our ultra-democratic age.

Depp is especially appealing. The wonder of his performance is that he was allowed to play a buccaneer who is, shall we say, nothing if not a light-stepping fellow. Indeed, his Captain Jack Sparrow resembles a drag-queen impersonating Keith Richards impersonating a drag-queen (Will reasons that his fey contortions are due to a bad case of heat stroke. Mm-hmm). That a star in a blockbuster of this magnitude should be given latitude to perform rather than simply be photographed as The Face is a small miracle.

Producer Bruckheimer usually paints his cinematic canvasses with a broad brush-stroke—a floor mop, let’s say. (One imagines some epic Wagnerian theme crashing in his head while he brushes his teeth or takes out the garbage.) Here, though, he allows director Gore Verbinksi and a talented cast of set designers to bring out all the right details of the piratical mise-en-scene in smaller strokes. The eye-patches, the plank, the parrot, the pieces of eight, the rum, the triremes with their cannons sticking out from the sides, moldy prisons overlooking emerald lagoons: all present and accounted for. ‘Pirates’ has the pulpy aura of childrens fiction from eras bygone, arranging its world with elements from such easily-spotted but artistically credible sources as Stevenson and Hugo. Or, at any rate, comic book versions of Stevenson and Hugo.

Even more fantastically, at times the film’s prop-room giddiness seems to evoke the smell of dry ice and damp cement, body odor and baby urine, so familiar to lovers of the Disneyland ride. Still, Bruckheimer’s largesse isn’t totally absent from the film, and that isn’t such a bad thing. The movie is bright and capacious, armed with real sets and props, and the digital cartooning is kept to a minimum. Sure, we get the usual Bruckish legend-making shot of tough guys walking toward the camera in slow-motion, done by a crew of throat-slitting pirates marching across the seafloor, but mostly his stylistic trademarks have been shelved. The classic grandeur is tasteful rather than bloated, serving as a reminder of just why we need big Hollywood films.

In the one area in which he clearly has license to indulge, Verbinksi knows how to use a good thing when he’s got it: skeleton pirates. Directors must come to accept the fact that animated skeleton armies, such as the fearsome boneheaps in Sam Raimi’s immortal “Army of Darkness”, are just plain good old-fashioned fun. I envision a new breed of comedy, leering skulls and severed bony limbs clutching rusty swords becoming a standard device along the lines of “a bit with a dog”. Mark my words, the day will come when Tom Hanks will star in a romantic comedy opposite an animated corpse, and I’m not talking about Cher.

‘Pirates’ isn’t what a noted fact-checker like George W. Bush would deem “historically accurate”, but to their credit the filmmakers preserved some semblance of the truth of the world they are depicting. British sailors are allowed to yell “Huzzah!” after a battle, for instance, rather than sounding like, as I was preparing myself for, a platoon of drunk Chicago Bears fans cheering a touchdown; a small but welcome detail. The script is literate but not showy; none of the dialogue is dumbed down below the level of the best kids’ movies (Sparrow makes a neat joke at the end, explaining to the magistrate that the tale’s resolution is among other things ‘grammatically correct’). And in a brazen affront to the demographics gods, there isn’t an American in sight. “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, this summer’s other conjuration of British boys’ fiction, might have succeeded if, as ‘Pirates’ so sweetly does, it had allowed its hothouse flowers to flourish in their native soil.