Master and Commander feels like a script that has been frantically and carelessly edited and dumbed-down for a modern American audience tired of actual war (i.e. the kind where people die) and eager for some heroic, black-and-white justification of aggressive foreign policy. Make no mistake, people die in Master and Commander, mostly in the first ten minutes and the last fifteen. But for being attacked by nineteenth century artillery, which mostly operated by blowing very big, messy holes into people, they die in an artificially quick and bloodless manner that sets the tone for the rest of the disappointingly mild film.
Master and Commander is simply a movie that refuses to take any risks. What begins well enough as the story of a mad captain unnecessarily endangering his men for the sake of personal conquests quickly decays into an endless cycle of shipboard misery and then at the end makes a 90 degree turn into unmitigated hero-worship. Director and screenwriter Peter Weir and screenwriter John Collee are unable to make the confined setting interesting and betray the fatalist atmosphere of most of the film with a forced and inappropriately light ending.
Set during the Napoleonic wars, the film is an adaptation of the popular Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. Jack Aubrey (Russel Crowe) commands the Surprise, a small vessel in the British navy sent to bring down the twice-as-large French Acheron in the waters off the Americas. Why, exactly, the English send what is comparatively a sailboat after a French battleship is one of the many mysteries and historical fudges of Master and Commander. (At one point, we're supposed to believe that the captain of the Acheron, supposedly a master sailor, mistakes the Surprise for a whaling vessel. This seems about as likely as an army sergeant mistaking a tank for a station wagon.) With his ship immediately attacked and badly crippled by the Acheron, Aubrey ("Lucky Jack" as he is called by his crewmen) nevertheless decides to pursue the French far beyond the call of duty and way past the limit of sanity.
It becomes clear early in the film that Aubrey is less Captain Kirk and more Captain Ahab. He ignores petty obstacles in his way, for example, monsoons, snow, and starvation, in his relentless pursuit for personal glory. The ship's doctor and naturalist Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) is a pacifistic foil to Aubrey's destructive tyrant. Where Aubrey seeks to destroy life, Maturin seeks to collect and study it. Several impassioned arguments between the two bring out the best in Crowe and Bettany, two fantastic actors with a history of film together (they portrayed roommates and best friends in A Beautiful Mind.) Bettany is more compelling because his character is more varied. Maturin is in a crisis, torn between supporting his best friend and speaking out for the dozens of lives at stake on the Surprise. Aubrey suffers from a lack of development that becomes chronic in other aspects of the film.
Like Aubrey, who never evolves or tries anything new, Master and Commander is restricted to the shipboard setting, yet doesn't take advantage of its intimacy or fascinating power structure. Though the film is subtitled The Far Side of the World, we rarely see anything more exotic than the deck and captain's cabin. The plot, too, is redundant: Aubrey finds the Acheron, loses it, sulks and argues with Maturin. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Where Master and Commander succeeds is in the moments between the special effects and battle sequences when it take the time to explore the denigration of the human mind stuck in interminable limbo aboard ship. The atmosphere is dark and hopeless throughout most of the film, a feeling that suits the death that begins and ends the story. The sailors grow frightened at their seemingly ordained bad luck and begin to psychologically torture their fellow crewmen, in one chilling sequence driving a weak lieutenant to suicide.
But despite a persistent string of misery that seems to be drawing Master and Commander to its inexorable ending, the film finishes banally, reversing your view of the mad captain with no justification and in a way that degrades the hours of serious footage before. It abandons its premise, tone and characters, even Maturin, in favor of nifty fight choreography and slowly sinks into a whirlpool of Hollywood clichés.
Master and Commander is rated PG-13 for intense battle sequences, related images and brief language.
Abigail Graber. Abigail Graber, according to various and sundry ill-conceived Internet surveys: She is: <ul><li>As smart as Miss America and smarter than Miss Washington, D.C., Miss Tennessee, Miss Massachusetts, and Miss New York</I> <li>A goddess of the wind</li> <li>An extremely low threat to the Bush administration</li> <li>Made … More »
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