Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Turned Oceans into Battlefields

The much-loved Russell Crowe naval film turns 20

By Kenneth Lowe  |  November 14, 2023 | 12:30pm
Movies Features Master and Commander
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Turned Oceans into Battlefields

We all want to think we desire movies about the depths of the human condition, about our fallibility in the face of unknowable infinity, about what makes good people stay true in a rotten world. And we do! But sometimes we also want a movie where the boys get together to wreck house, where the bad guys are right over there and the right and dutiful and most expedient course of action is to point a whole lotta guns at ‘em and shoot ‘til you’re empty.

There is no better actor to headline this specific kind of guilty pleasure than Russell Crowe, a guy who seems like he is having the time of his life when he is explaining to other men the precise way in which they are about to kick ass, then telling them about how much faith he has in their ability to kick ass, and then, finally, kicking ass. Crowe, a guy who paid his dues in all manner of quiet and intimate films during his decades coming up in the business, hit it big with one Best Picture winner in 2000, and then it was off to the races.

This is why I think of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World as the sequel Gladiator never (or at least, has not yet) had. Based on a series of novels about a brave and dutiful captain on a British Navy vessel during the Napoleonic Wars, it of course has nothing to do with Crowe’s earlier picture, but it is a spiritual sequel nonetheless. If Gladiator was a lucky shot, Master and Commander proved the adage coined by Chris Rock, who once said: “If you’re doing a movie about the past, you’d best to get Russell’s ass.”

It’s 1805, and, to Twitter’s great delight, oceans are now battlefields. Aboard the HMS Surprise, Captain Jack Aubrey (Crowe) commands a crew of a few dozen men on a small, fast ship with straightforward orders: The fancy new French vessel Acheron is in the waters near Brazil, trying to sail around Cape Horn to reach the Pacific and, in the movie’s words “carry the war” there. Aubrey and his crew are to hunt the Acheron down and “sink her, burn her, or take her a Prize.” That’s all there is to it.

You’re either on board or you’re not. Like the best unambiguously militaristic period pieces, switching a portion of your brain off is the best way to view it. Do not quibble over how stupid it is that humanity has contrived ways to kill each other while at sea, a place it is literally impossible for us to survive for long, and where man in his hubris needs no further assistance ending up in a watery grave. There’s a French boat that needs sinking.

Master and Commander would not succeed at suspending its audience’s disbelief without the incredible setting that is the Surprise herself, a functional ship built in 1970 as the HMS Rose as a replica tall ship and converted extensively in 2001 for the purposes of making the movie, a thing that would not happen today for numerous reasons that begin and end with the fact that Iron Man came out just five years later.

Director Peter Weir uses his incredible practical set to invest every scene with the weight and momentum of life at sea—cramped interiors, the deck listing with the waves, the everyday toil of life aboard a ship in the age of sail. It’s a movie that takes its time, where engagements unfold over not seconds, but hours and sometimes weeks as the two ships play cat and mouse with one another far from their home ports.

The movie begins with the Surprise encountering the Acheron in the fog and taking it on the chin: Their foe is bigger, faster and has the wind in their favor. Aubrey puts it bluntly: They are soundly beaten, and must figure out how to engage such an enemy without getting blown to splinters. The rest of the movie is a series of gambits to catch up to the Acheron, assess her weaknesses, and find ways of out-sailing and out-gunning her for crown and country.

But the real heart of Master and Commander doesn’t have anything to do with those scenes, and more to do with the quieter, episodic parts of the film’s middle stretch, where the sailors and marines aboard ship (all with their own arcs or individual struggles) pray and work and sing and deal with the horror that is early 19th century battlefield medicine. Holding the scalpel is Paul Bettany’s Stephen, a doctor and naturalist pressed into naval service who wants nothing more than a detour to the Galapagos to discover new critters.

(While Stephen speaks of evolutionary theory four whole years before Charles Darwin was even born, it’s worth noting that many scientists had been on their way to the theory—even positing that humans descended from primates—before Darwin beat them to the patent.)

Captain Aubrey and Stephen’s friendship is one of the best parts of the movie, with the two playing string duets to punctuate changes in scenery and circumstance (Crowe reportedly learned violin just for the movie). In a picture that wanders through the middle portion, their conflict and reconciliation through bloody, briny hardship is the throughline.

Finally, though, the Surprise lures in her quarry. Disguising themselves as a damaged whaling ship, Aubrey and his men corner the Acheron and proceed to rip and tear until it is done. The final battle is a red and raucous melee, and at the end of it the movie lingers on the faces of the dead. “197 souls,” reads the ship’s description at the beginning of the movie, a framing the movie doesn’t let the viewer forget.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is written, acted, plotted and subtitled as if it expected to be a series of films, as if Captain Aubrey and Stephen and the rough sailors and marines of the Surprise were meant to sail the seven seas blowing up other French vessels, losing other limbs or, presumably, invading America at some point. But despite that broken promise, I’m glad it didn’t happen. There is no way any subsequent films would have been as well-considered, as fastidious, as suffused with the groaning of timber and the flapping of sails, as this one. It’s unfortunate that the last we see of the Surprise is her stern as she sails off on another adventure we’ll never see, but when it ends such a perfect tale, maybe it’s the best we can hope for.

Kenneth Lowe must choose the lesser of two weevils. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

 
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