In early 2021, Peter Weir’s 2003 seafaring adventure film, Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, surprisingly became a trending topic on Twitter after a young user suggested watching it as a palliative for those suffering from insomnia during the pandemic. Of course, their mistake was tagging the lead actor, Russell Crowe, who responded in kind, saying kids today have no focus, going on to defend Weir’s film as “an exacting, detail-oriented epic tale” that’s “definitely an adult’s movie.” If Crowe’s broad swipe at youth culture sounds like the type of crotchety old man defending-his-turf attack that often surfaces when older generations begin to feel irrelevant, he’s absolutely not wrong about Master & Commander—a film that is ambitious in its fervent, almost obsessive, attention to detail and one that’s also impossible to imagine being made (or widely appreciated) today, even for a fraction of its original $150 million budget.
Now, Master & Commander didn’t exactly set the world on fire in terms of its early-aughts’ audience response (though it more than made its money back), but it went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Cinematography and, to this day, continues to have a small but impassioned group of defenders. I mention box office and Oscars not because they actually matter, but because even in 2003, the film was still something of a love it or hate it affair. But in the intervening 20 years, and upon a rewatch, it’s clear you don’t need Crowe’s tweet to suspect that today’s audiences would be even more strongly divided by a film so firmly committed to verisimilitude through a remarkable accumulation of minute social, historical and even biological details that many modern moviegoers would certainly find themselves wondering “But where’s the story?”
There is, obviously, British Captain Jack Aubrey’s (Crowe) dogged pursuit of the elusive French vessel, the Acheron, to anchor the narrative. But even this pursuit—which involves three direct encounters (only one of which actually builds into an extended battle scene) scattered throughout the film’s 138-minute runtime—is frequently disrupted by a series of digressions delivered in the form of mini-narratives, including a visit to the Galapagos islands and the demise of a young midshipman, Hollom (Lee Ingleby), who is unfairly blamed for a stretch of bad luck thanks to the crew’s intensifying hunger and brewing superstitions.
The vignette-driven approach of the film stems from the screenplay’s combining of events from three of Patrick O’Brian’s 20 novels centered on the exploits of Jack Aubrey. But despite the stitched together nature of the screenwriting, Weir and company weave the various events together quite seamlessly into a cohesive whole, presenting them as all occurring during the same mission to track down the Acheron. And as such, the film has something of an upstairs-downstairs quality in its acute examinations of the quotidian aspects of the lives of everyone from Captain Jack to the prepubescent underlings working below deck. In terms of scope, it also delicately balances the epic nature of their quest, which takes them hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from where they began, with the individual fears and ambitions of countless men and boys aboard the ship, presenting a remarkable breadth of experience (and perspectives) of seafaring in the 19th century.
For all its heightened specificity in presenting the minutiae of the tasks and knowledge needed to properly run a military ship at this time, Master and Commander never gets bogged down by the details. Thanks in large part to Russell Boyd’s nimble cinematography and Lee Smith’s taut editing, the film moves along briskly while Crowe’s masterful blend of arrogant professionalism, brash humor and a persistent sense of fun and adventure keeps the film fleet of foot even in the most dire of circumstances. Meanwhile, Paul Bettany’s Dr. Stephen Maturin, a scientist and Jack’s longtime friend, highlights the film’s themes of male camaraderie (the two jam sessions he and Jack have in the Captain’s quarters are quite moving in their sheer simplicity and emotional directness) and serves as a lone voice of reason when it appears Jack’s pride may be extending further than his national duty.
The film’s harmonizing of the epic and the intimate reaches its peak in the third act during a stopover in the Galapagos Islands, during which Maturin is finally allowed to indulge his fascination with entomology and zoology and studies the extremely unique forms of life that inhabit the remote area. It’s a compelling detour primarily because it captures the rapturous experience of making massive discoveries (in a way that feels both historically accurate and otherworldly) better than any film since aside from Terrence Malick’s The New World. But the filmmakers also beautifully dovetail this sequence into the final battle as Maturin’s discussion of a bug he discovered that can naturally camouflage itself (it appears to be something akin to a Walking Stick) sparks a new tactic that Jack uses in the impending battle with the Acheron.
It’s this type of intensely careful attention to detail and the ability to meld such small moments into a cohesive and quietly thrilling whole that makes Master and Commander such a singular film. Sure, it works great as a character study and as a war film, but its enduring power is in its unflinching desire at not only depicting a bygone and hyperspecific way of life, but in truly placing the audience within that world.
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