Movie Review:

Master and Commander:
The Far Side of the World

    Master and Commander is director Peter Weir's first film in five years, his last being 1998's The Truman Show, itself the director's first film in five years at the time.  His latest certainly has the look of a film that would require years to complete, if not five specifically.  With three studios (20th Century Fox, Miramax, and Universal) on board and a reported budget of $135 million, Master and Commander supposedly only took three months to shoot, but the entire project took three years, and the construction of the ships alone took months.

    It is on this level of spectacle that the film is most successful.  The attention to detail on the ship is astonishing, and credibly places the viewer at sea in 1805 with a minimum of CGI.  The opening attack on the British frigate Surprise is cringe-inducingly realistic, with the shrieking of cannonballs through the air and the splintering of wood putting the audience squarely in the middle of the action.

    Don't expect to go to Master and Commander just for the action, though - between the opening cannon strike and the final battle between the Surprise and its enemy, the French frigate Acheron, there is quite a bit else to be concerned with, including other trials of the Surprise, such as sailing through a typhoon near Cape Horn, and the interactions of the men aboard the ship.

    Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) is captain of the Surprise, and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) is the ship's doctor.  The two are close friends, but they clash frequently on this particular trip, wih Maturin questioning Aubrey's motivations in continuing after the Acheron despite having been crippled by the superior ship in their first meeting.  Maturin is also a naturalist whose interest is piqued by the Galapagos Islands, though his desire to study them is several times frustrated by Aubrey's sense of duty.

    Taking the first half of its title from the entire 20-volume series of Patrick O'Brian novels, The Far Side of the World is actually the tenth in the set.  It was chosen to provide this film's main narrative due mostly to the more dramatic nature of it - a crippled Surprise pursuing a superior enemy - and also because Weir wanted the film to take place almost entirely at sea.

    Nevertheless, the film combines aspects from several of the Master and Commander novels, and the result feels a bit overstuffed.  In that sense it is a perfect tribute to O'Brian, who crammed as much as he possibly could into every novel, but it feels a bit bloated onscreen, with more subplots than are really necessary and the feeling that Weir (who also co-wrote the screenplay) didn't want to cut anything from the novel he didn't absolutely have to.  The film ends up 138 minutes long as a result, and sometimes drags a bit - to stay true to the novels' intentions (O'Brian referred to them as "Aubrey/Maturin novels"), Weir refuses to shorten Maturin's naturalist trek around the Galapagos, even though it ends up accomplishing very little except giving Aubrey an idea of how to take on the Acheron.  The "science informs warfare" message is cute, but it could have been done in less time.  Other seemingly extraneous scenes, such as various surgeries performed by Maturin, can be more acceptably dismissed as "period color."

    Fortunately, the focus on various characters is not wasted by a good cast, led by Crowe and Bettany as perfect foils.  Crowe's Aubrey is not an unsophisticated man - he even plays the violin - but he is driven more by instinct on board the ship than is the coolly logical Maturin, played wonderfully by Bettany.  The cast is filled out by mostly unknown - at least in America - British actors, including some surprisingly good performances from several adolescent newcomers as midshipmen.  (A surprising, but accurate, period recreation is that boys as young as 12 or 13 often served in important capacities on board ships, even those in the Royal Navy as the Surprise is.)

    With the combination of solid spectacle, period detail, and good acting, Master and Commander is certainly a worthwhile expenditure of time, even at well over two hours.  It tries to cram in a bit more than it should, but the main plot is solid and the characters mostly work.