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Master and Commander is a film that shuns a lot of the usual conventions. There are no opening credits and no music starts the film, with eerie sound effects creating a foreboding atmosphere straight away. In fact, the film has little in the way of a typical score, with much of the music consisting of well known classical compositions played by the characters on screen. Secondly, no women have speaking parts and the fairer sex barely makes an appearance at all; there is no romantic subplot. There isn't much of a plot at all, in fact, with the film basically consisting of a British ship chasing (or being chased by) a French one during the Napoleonic wars. Almost the whole film takes place on board the British vessel, with a lot of the film dealing with the minutiae of life on board. All that, thanks to Peter Weir's direction, adds up to an absolutely superb film.
Russell Crowe plays Captain Jack Aubrey with the skill that has come to be expected from him. Regardless of his real-life temper tantrums and propensity for throwing telephones at hotel maids, it's impossible to deny that the man knows how to act and can do so with great intensity. His co-star is Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon and Aubrey's confidant. In some respects the film is an unusual sort of buddy movie, although in this case the two main characters have a shipload of Navy crewmen tagging along with them. A number of the smaller characters have quite important roles to play and are all very well developed and played. One of the more compelling subplots involves the sailors' growing superstitions that one of the officers is a 'Judas', a jinx to the rest on board. All of this is forgetting another major character in the film, that of the ship itself, the HMS Surprise. The set design is unbelievably detailed and exudes authenticity right down to the smallest component.
Bookending the film are two excellent, hard-hitting fight scenes, and there is one other major action scene in the middle as the Surprise rounds the treacherous Cape Horn at the tip of South America. This scene in particular shows off the excellent effects; all the stormy seas are created by computer and prove just how accurate artificial recreation of water is becoming. The main reason the film works so well, though, is that it is tense from beginning to end. The viewer shares the characters' fear that the enemy ship could show up and attack at any time.
There were two seafaring adventures released in 2003, both coincidentally featuring a Captain Jack. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean is a fun romp, Master and Commander is a gripping, realistic portrayal of Naval warfare in the early 1800s. Had it not also been released in the same year as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, it may have bagged a haul of Oscars (having received ten nominations), which would have been well deserved.
The extras
Strangely, the DVD case rather undersells the special features: the "Making of" featurette turns out to be a superb 70-minute documentary. Another 20-minute feature details the adaptation process from Patrick O'Brian's novels. There's also a 30 minute piece devoted to the special effects, 20 minutes on sound design (with an interesting interactive demonstration), a 25-minute HBO "First Look", six deleted scenes and a multiple camera angle interactive feature. It's excellent, only lacking a commentary, but the documentaries provide so much information that it's perhaps not needed.
The summary
Master and Commander is an excellent character study and an exciting and suspense-filled historical thriller.
