Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Widescreen Edition)
by Peter Weir
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Actor: Billy Boyd, Edward Woodall, James D'Arcy, Paul Bettany, Russell CroweDirector: Peter Weir
Brand: TCFHE
Writer: Peter Weir
Producer: Alan B. Curtiss
Producer: Bob Weinstein
Producer: Duncan Henderson
Producer: Harvey Weinstein
Writer: John Collee
Writer: Patrick O'Brian
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 138 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-04-20
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: Russell's gonna need a bigger boat
Summary: 4 Stars
Russell Crowe is perfectly cast for this role. I can really believe in him as a commander who is one part fighter, one part man of learning. In one of my favorite recurring sequences in this movie, he and Paul Bettany, who plays the ship's doctor/naturalist/philosopher, perform classical duets on violin and cello, just for fun. (How they keep moisture and salt out of those instruments, which always seem to be sitting in the open, I cannot imagine.) Not only do these scenes set them both up as cultured men, but they dramatize that this relationship has been going on long before we join up with them. It's a brilliant way of getting a chunk of back-story out of the way in seconds.
The protagonists' strong friendship, however, gets put to the test early on. There's no doubt Russell's character, like Russell himself, is a fair man with his fists, and when push comes to shove, like Russell himself, he prefers duels to duets. That's why he's put in charge of the HMS Surprise, a British warship sailing the seas during the Napoleonic Wars. (That's the early 1800s, for all you who have History For Dummies on your Amazon wish list.) When the ship encounters a bigger, faster, meaner French vessel that wants to blow them out of the water, Russell goes on the offensive and chases the Frenchies around Cape Horn, through some of the nastiest storms this side of FEMA.
Coincidentally, I rented this movie the same day as Steven Spielberg's Munich, and both films vaguely share a theme: fists or brains? Reason or violence? Neither film finds an answer (as if one could) but in both case characters take each side of the debate and argue passionately their beliefs, thoughts which are as old as the ancient Greeks at least. Yet despite some excellent moments in each film, and the high-minded intentions of each, somehow both come out feeling a little hollow somehow.
Perhaps it is the attempt to rationalize what are, at bottom, irrational acts--terrorism in Munich and a style of warfare that was very much like terrorism, or at least guerilla warfare, in the early 19th century. It's gratifying to hear Crowe and Bettany debating fists vs. books downstairs in the captain's quarters. At the same time, I feel we've all been here before, and neither one has anything new to add.
To be sure, all the prep work has been done. Early on we meet a young lad of about 12 who has been pressed into service. He loses an arm, yet he still wants to fight and is inspired by Crowe's meeting, when he was also about 12, with Lord Nelson, who also lacked one limb. There's something fascinating here about such a young man being forced to serve, losing an arm, and wanting to continue on, in the way this parallels Crowe's own early years in the service. Yet as with the fight vs. think duality between Crowe and Bettany, the film never quite makes enough out of it. We are just presented these spectacles to observe, but they don't develop, or at least not much.
Some parts of Master and Commander, however, are masterful. The storm sequences are stunning, the scenes where we watch the crew handle the ship make us feel like we are with them. The tricks and double-tricks of early naval warfare are fascinating to watch. Australian director Peter Weir is masterfully understated at times--there's a scene where an officer does a Dick Cheney on the ship's doctor, and the doctor has to operate on himself while someone else holds up a mirror so he can peer into his own wound. This could have been done with much gratuitous gore. Instead Weir gives us what we need to know and no more. And the Galapagos Island scenes are like a breath of fresh air: we feel as relieved as they to get off that cramped, damp ship. (Again, *how* did they keep the moisture out of those instruments?)
While on the Galapagos Islands, making proto-Darwinian observations about creatures great and small, they stumble again upon the French warship, which sends Crowe in a tizzy because of his desire to get the better of a faster, bigger enemy. Somehow this had the feeling of inevitability to it, to the point that my wife, watching it with me, said as soon as they disembarked "They're going to find that ship again." It had a slightly mechanical quality to it. And although Kirk and Spock--I mean Crowe and Bettany--kick around the philosophical bean bag, neither really has a revelation or learns from the other. They end where they began. Quite literally.
Compare this with another film with some similar themes which I think is one of the all-time neglected masterpieces, Never Cry Wolf (1983). The central character here is living at peace with nature--and two Inuits whom he thinks are the antithesis of modern civilized man with all his problems. Then one of those men shakes him up. While sitting on a rock cleaning his rifle, he tells our hero that he would have no qualms hunting and killing the wolves our hero adores because he has to buy rifle bullets and he needs a new snowmobile and wolf pelts go for several hundred dollars and he has to feed his family and...And we realize then and there that the whole set-up of the "Noble Savage" has been shattered by this one quiet scene. (For those of you not familiar with the concept, look it up in Wikipedia.) After that scene our hero--and we--are changed--in ways he only comes to grips with in the film's deeply moving, almost haiku-like coda. In the present movie, there *is* a bit of a twist at the very end, and no, I couldn't foresee it, and neither will you. But it didn't feel like enough. (It does leave the film open for a nice sequel, though. There are something like 20 novels in this series, so there are lots to choose from. It could become like Harry Potter.)
To me the film could never convincingly settle on being either a cerebral drama about the dawning of the age of science or a tense cat-and-mouse thriller. (Parts of it reminded me of a cross between Wolfgang Peterson's Das Boot and Steven Spielberg's Duel, believe it or not.) I'm aware that Weir likes to combine and blur American genres--his Witness (1985) is a great and effective example of this. But I don't feel this film was as seamlessly joined.
The cast is uniformly excellent, however, and all the technicals are first-rate. Indeed very quickly we forget all about the Hollywood trickery and believe we are really at sea, traveling through storms and battles. Like a lot of films, this could have been a bit shorter, but the first half in particular has many edge-of-the-seat moments. In fact, we get so wrapped up in the events on board the Surprise that when the French ship finally appears up close, it almost feels strange to realize here is another craft with its own crew, its own captain--until now they've been abstractions. It's at this point I felt the film turned into another, different movie--a rather straightforward action film, with Russell Crowe slashing the enemy to bits with a feral quality reminiscent of...Russell Crowe. As I said, there's a twist at the end, but it wasn't enough and it left me feeling oddly unsettled, as if I'd just given the filmmakers two and a half hours of my time and got neither a resolution nor an open-ended question, just another chase.
Still, for the spectacle alone this is worth a rental. I just don't agree with some people, such as my erstwhile colleague James Liu ("Dr. Jimbob" in these pages) that this is a modern Kurosawa-esque film. Kurosawa would have left us more of a moral dilemma to chew on. He would have expressed it more fully, gone deeper. He wouldn't have raised interesting issues, only to step away from them to go fight another battle.
Description of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Widescreen Edition)
When a sudden attack by a French warship inflicts casualities and severe damage upon his vessel, Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey (Crowe) of the British Royal Navy is torn between duty and friendship as he embarks on a thrilling, high-stakes chase across two oceans to intercept and capture the enemy at any cost. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture!In the capable hands of director Peter Weir, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a seafaring adventure like no other, impeccably authentic, dynamically cast, and thrilling enough to give any classic swashbuckler a run for its money. In adapting two of Patrick O'Brian's enormously popular novels about British naval hero Capt. Jack Aubrey, Weir and cowriter John Collee have changed the timeframe from the British/American war of 1812 to the British/French opposition of 1805, where the HMS Surprise, under Aubrey's confident command, is patrolling the South Atlantic in pursuit of the Acheron, a French warship with the strategic advantage of greater size, speed, and artillery. Russell Crowe is outstanding as Aubrey, firm and fiercely loyal, focused on his prey even if it means locking horns with his friend and ship's surgeon, played by Crowe's A Beautiful Mind costar Paul Bettany. Employing a seamless combination of carefully matched ocean footage, detailed models, full-scale ships, and CGI enhancements, Weir pays exacting attention to every nautical detail, while maintaining a very human story of honor, warfare, and survival under wretched conditions. Raging storms and hull-shattering battles provide pulse-pounding action, and a visit to the Galapagos Islands lends a note of otherworldly wonder, adding yet another layer of historical perspective to this splendidly epic adventure. --Jeff Shannon
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