MAC:TFSOTW is, however, a much better movie than Pirates of the Caribbean; it’s a terrific adventure (with none of that gooey romance crap, thank god!), filmed with an artistic and detail-minded eye, immersing you in battle the way that Black Hawk Down did. But its main characters are scantily sketched and act inconsistently with what little we know of them. You may not be as bothered by these skips in the record as I was; in fact, you probably won’t be, but they nagged at me enough to interfere with my enjoyment of the movie.
This movie should have been released at the beginning of the year to take full advantage of the zeitgeist, because the French are the villains, and damned villainous they are. You think Jacques Chirac is a jerk, try Napoleon. (Actually, I’m always a little disoriented when Napoleon is cast as a bad guy, because I first learned about him in France, where he’s a national hero [fun facts about Napoleon appeared on the backs of Cheerios boxes there].) It’s up to the intrepid Brits to keep those oily Frenchies from conquering the world (so that, you know, the British can conquer it themselves), and amongst their weaponry is Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (presumably the Master and Commander of the title -- though I get an image of a dominatrix when I hear that title, but maybe it’s just me) of the H.M.S. Surprise.
Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is the best boss ever. He’s noble, decisive, and strong; metes out discipline and reward with rigorous fairness; bucks up the timid; praises the brave; never asks anyone to do something he wouldn’t do himself; and kicks back at the end of the day with a few bad jokes and a whole lot of alcohol. And he looks ever so dashing hanging off the mast and various other parts of the ship. In fact, he’s a little too perfect. Oh, he’s got a heroic flaw, all right, but it’s a flaw in the sense that your answer to the job-interview question, “What is your biggest weakness?” is a weakness. It’s this flaw – and I’m trying hard to talk around it so that I don’t give anything away, not that it would ruin a plot point or anything, but there are moments of suspense that I don’t want to disarm – that isn’t adhered to; at a crucial moment, Captain Aubrey acts in complete contradiction to what’s been established of his character so far, and no one in the movie ever comments on it (at least, I don’t think anyone does; between the naval jargon and the thick accents, it can be hard to understand the dialogue). I never read (and don’t intend to read) the Patrick O’Brian books on which the movie is based, so I don’t know if the fault lies with O’Brian or with writer-director Peter Weir.
(No, I’m not going to drool over Crowe, incidentally, partly because it’s simply not possible to forget that he was once attracted to Meg Ryan, but mostly because he looks kind of puffy. I like him leaner, and with his shirt off.)
Weir manages to seed the big-budget action movie with touches of art: the shots of ropes and sailors silhouetted through a sunlit sail are gorgeous, hulking ships dissolve into fog like phantoms, and the quiet opening sequence involves you just as immediately in the world of the movie as the more energetic one in Gangs of New York did. And it’s impossible to film the Galapagos Islands and not come away with stunning views. (The movie is sprinkled with a few heavy-handed laugh lines, but, surprisingly, not a single person in the audience seemed to get the joke when Aubrey promises his friend, the ship’s doctor and an amateur naturalist, that he’ll get to see the Galapagos, then muses, “You may well be the first naturalist ever to set foot on the Galapagos.”)
Internal inconsistencies aside, Master and Commander is what a big-budget action movie should be: the conflicts are rousing and absorbing, the budget is lavishly but wisely spent, details and art are not totally ignored.
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