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It’s very gratifying to see that two decades after its making, “Master and Commander” continues to do well on streaming platforms and not only has a solid base of core fans but also picks up new ones. There has been a tradition of tall ships films going back to the 1930s, but it had been a while and the undertaking was a calculated risk by Fox executive Tom Rothman, who dreamed up the project as a possible new franchise. Though it wasn’t the flop that some people suggest and even turned a profit in worldwide figures, it wasn’t the blockbuster that was needed to justify sequels. Rothman is also to be thanked for choosing Peter Weir to direct the film and investing all the time it took to get him to say yes.
Weir had a great career as a director, especially one coming out of Australian television,having achieved international success with “Picnic at Hanging Rock”in 1975. He was a director who could work in any genre and his films included “The Year of Living Dangerously”. “Gallipoli”. “Witness”, “Dead Poets Society” and “The Truman Show”. He was given a large budget and great freedom as a co-producer and co-screenwriter, and was a fan of the books himself. He took a straightforward, serious approach, ignoring many of the tropes of the genre. Notably, there is no big romance, once a prerequisite for any epic-length action film. There is also no subplot taking place involving politicians and admirals in London, no Governor’s Ball in some colorful colonial capital, only the briefest glimpse at any local people and no overtly comic sidekicks. It takes place entirely aboard the ship at sea.
His goal was to make its depiction of life on board a military ship in the early 1800s as authentic as possible, and this he accomplished so well that historians of the period go out of their way to praise it. The historical situation is not quite as perfect, (in 1805 Napoleon was not yet the “Master of Europe”) and in fact in the book it’s the War of 1812 and the enemy ship preying on Pacific Ocean British whalers is American. Try getting that financed in Hollywood. With typical economy, Weir introduces you to life aboard the ship at dawn in a long, almost totally silent sequence without any opening credits that tells you all you need to know. Within minutes we learn that life aboard is always in jeopardy and that this is a serious world where just waking up in sound shape is something to be thankful for.
We are then thrown into a harrowing situation where the ship, H.M.S. Surprise, is under attack by the larger, faster, greater-gunned French ship, The Acheron. We meet Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) who immediately shows his leadership and ability to make correct decisions, which is one of the themes of the film. In this case he has to turn and run to lose the enemy in the fog, which shows that he won’t let ego get in the way of the right choice. Known as “Lucky Jack”, he values his ship and the men on it and they know it. He will have to make a number of decisions as things develop, one of them particularly troubling, but he does what must be done. Russell Crowe is superb in conveying this character who is as intelligent and responsible as he is a fighter who will be the first to board an enemy ship when the time comes. He also plays violin and performs duets with his friend and ship’s surgeon, Dr. Stephen Maturin.Their friendship is one of the highlights of the film and Maturin is probably the only man with any access to Aubrey’s inner thoughts. The doctor is the modern man of the Enlightenment while Aubrey is more traditional and though they clash at times, it’s mostly along the expected lines of the idealist and the realist. These never develop into dense philosophical arguments as some might suggest, though at one point the doctor tells Aubrey that ego, not duty, is driving him. Paul Bettany is up to the task of standing up to Crowe without melting and creates a warm, human character of the surgeon. Both actors actually learned to play their instruments so it would look right and documentaries have shown them actually playing the music note for note, even though professional recordings were used for the final cut.
All of the other actors are convincing in their roles. They should be, as they had to go through “boot camp” training to learn their jobs on the ship and how to do everything from climbing the rigging to loading and firing the cannons. It was a long shoot, mostly in Mexico and the isolated circumstances led to them working well as a group. It’s hard for me to grasp how almost 200 men could live and work together on a ship this size. Officers, midshipmen, Marines, sailors, cooks (there were even animals aboard for food), in conditions virtually no one today would find tolerable. Duty, loyalty to each other in conditions where if the enemy didn’t get you, the sea might and a strict hierarchy shown by the various uniforms, held it all together. Even then things could get rough, as when superstition causes a crisis on the journey
The midshipmen get a much larger presence here than usual in films, where they often aren’t depicted at all or if they are, they are played by older actors. Here they are actually played by the 13 to 15 year olds they would have been back then. And they are treated as adults, fighting, drinking with the older officers at dinner and not spared from danger. This looks rather startling today, seeing what look like children in this situation, but like the rest of the details it’s historically accurate. People didn’t live as long back then and didn’t create an extended childhood into their twenties. The midshipmen are upper class, of course and the youngest is addressed once as Lord Blackeney, but there are even younger teens among the sailors. As for the rest of the cast, Weir went out of his way to find men who didn’t look “modern” and he succeeded.
The film was made on a real replica of a period ship - the Rose, a 160’ 20-gun frigate - modified to become the Surprise. In fact it was when Weir was touring the Rose while trying to decide whether to do the film that he found out the ship was for sale - and when the studio okayed buying it, he said yes. There was also a duplicate built and mounted on platforms set in the enormous water tank used for “Titanic”. The ship looks very lived in, a big improvement over the past when even some of the better movies in the genre had perfectly clean movie set decks. The violent Cape Horn storm was real and was the result of a replica of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, duplicating his journey allowing their transit of the Cape to be filmed for “Master and Commander”.
This is a film whose worth is being more and more appreciated over time and it’s really good they got to make it before CGI took over. This is probably the best approximation of life on ships of this type that we’ll ever see. I got the blu-ray. If you activate them, there’s a pop-up map you can call up to show you where the ship is and a similar history/trivia function that will fill you in on those kinds of details if you wish. Since this is a film most fans will watch more than once, it’s nice to have those options. But the best are the deleted scenes, of which there are quite a few. None of them are big, dramatic scenes with lots of dialogue, but there were many bits of two minutes or less that had to be cut for time but which illustrate a lot of day-to-day shipboard life.
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Special Features, the best I've seen.
It's worth it just for the Features about the MUSIC. ( And Russell Crowe ended up buying a violin ! )And the Features about how they worked up the images of the ship- including a real ship- is the best I've seen.
Top reviews from other countries
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Ross Eduardo MaldonadoReviewed in Mexico on March 9, 2022
Doblada al español latino
Gran película. Excelente sonido en 5.1 canales. Doblaje al español latino.Doblada al español latinoRoss Eduardo Maldonado
Reviewed in Mexico on March 9, 2022
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Gilbert FaesReviewed in Belgium on July 3, 2024
Aankoop Master & Commander Blu-ray
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