MASTER & COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD review

I saw MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD weeks ago, yet I’ve been holding off writing a review because I have been wrestling with how to write about the film.

You see, I absolutely love the movie, but I have a terrible feeling that it will fail miserably at the box office for all the wrong reasons. You see, the movie is being sold as an action film. A nautical high seas, high stakes romantic days of yesteryear type of thing, and that is… not at all, what the film is.

To me, this is the most “Kubrick” film I’ve seen since his passing. Peter Weir has created the Napoleonic-era Sea-faring version of 2001 in many ways. I feel strongly that the promotional campaign that is in place is going to set audiences up for a movie that is in actuality… VERY DIFFERENT.

I love films about the high seas. The various adaptations of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY or the high seas adaptations like CAPTAIN BLOOD or THE SEA HAWK or THE BLACK SWAN, but through all the years of loving these classic films of ships and cannons. These films about rowing for wind and praying for rain… Through the various cannon fights and seizing of foreign ships… I’ve always known that it wasn’t quite right.

If you’ve ever read any historical works upon the era the first thing that would bother you about those classic films is the make-up of the crew. It was always way too old. Usually you’d see a cabin boy that’d be young on the ship, but in this era, there were many pre-adolescents and teens serving and doing HARD LABOR on the high seas. You never really got the idea of ship’s carpenters and of the provisions they had aboard, like the farm animals and the raw lumber materials. You have never seen one of these films that seriously dealt with the strategy of the battles and the positioning or attacks.

Also, if you’ve seen enough of these films, you get the idea that it was relatively simple to sink a ship, but in actuality… that was quite a difficult thing to do. Besides there was money to be made for capturing the other ship and crew. In most films, you see two classes of people aboard these ships. The officers and the men under them. But it was always far more complicated than that.

Rather than lecture about all of this, let me just say, see the film. The laying out of command, seamanship and battle in this are laid out in excruciating detail. So much so, that characters and plot are always put behind “the way things are done.” For some, this will be tedious. For some, the movie could feel lumbersome and unwieldy, but for me… It felt like a window into a time long ago.

It felt less like theatrical entertainment and more like a document of the way things were. And I loved that. The film is about the little things like the sand on the floor of the operating room floor during battle. The wooden shrapnel and the damage it causes. The superstitions of the men on ship. The crew quarters and the hammocks and “the last stitch.” The wonders of an unknown world, yet explored. The duty to one’s country. The Sam Peckinpah like battles between ships, where instead of bullets through bodies, it’s cannonballs through ships… Wooden shrapnel instead of squib hits.

The repairs, the faith in one’s captain. The Chess like thinking that went into battle. The sacrifices in friendship, in science and in battle. The hard “inhuman” choices of the “good of the many” that a leader must make.

The cruel cost of combat.

This isn’t a film about dialogue or showy performance scenes… this is about duty, position and staying true to one’s purpose. Sure character is revealed within all of that, but it isn’t the most surface level. Much of the character work here is internalized and intellectual.

By no means is this dumbed down Hollywood entertainment. This isn’t the caramel coated popcorn fun of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, this is also not a treatise upon the inhumanity of war. This is about the way things were done on the high seas by one helluva professional military Captain and his crew.

Russell Crowe is fantastic, as is Paul Bettany and the rest of the cast, but more than that… it’s Peter Weir’s movie, the production designer’s movie, the wonderful source material and the anthropology of it all.

This weekend, I don’t believe you could possibly see two movies further apart than MASTER & COMMANDER and LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION. Choose, wisely.