I went to see the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the
World last night, and I must say I was impressed. As a long time
fan of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series I had
carefully kept my expectations low so as not to be disappointed. The
finished product is much better than I had hoped, and though there are any
number of absurdities I find myself rather more approving than not.

Spoiler warning: if you haven’t seen the movie or read the books, you
might not want to read further.

My first grounds for worry was the title, which is the concatenation of
two of the titles in the Aubrey/Maturin series–the first book, in which
Jack Aubrey is indeed a master and commander, and the tenth, in which
Jack has long been a post-captain. I was afraid that the movie was going
to be some kind of unholy conglomeration of disparate plots.

In fact, although the movie does draw on a fund of small incidents from here and
there in the series, the plot is roughly based on the latter of the two
books, The Far Side of the World, though there are some
amusing changes. In O’Brian’s novel, H.M.S. Surprise is ordered
to follow the United States frigate Norfolk, of 32 guns, into the
Pacific. The Norfolk has been sent to wreck havoc on English
whalers; Surprise is to stop her from so doing. That’s right–the
bad guys are Americans. I imagine the producers found this unpalatable,
but in any event the movie moves the action from during the War of 1812
to some seven years earlier, and transforms the Norfolk into the
French privateer Acheron–which, though French, is not only
American-built but is astonishingly like the American 32-gun heavy
frigates which British ships didn’t encounter until years later.

But that’s by the way. I did not expect the plot to follow any of the
O’Brian novels very accurately, if at all. What I was hoping for, at best,
was an extra-canonical tale with the same characters and setting.

Fan-fiction, in other words.

What I got was a tale that, for all its changes, followed one of the
books much better than I’d expected, and got quite a lot absolutely right.

To begin with, the visuals were perfect. H.M.S. Surprise, an old
friend, was a delight to see. I can give the movie-makers no higher
praise than this–I sat through the closing credits, as I always do, and
when the Industrial Light and Magic and Weta Digital visual effects
credits were scrolling by I was dumbfounded. It literally had not
occurred to me, while watching it, that there were any special effects at
all.

After the visuals, the sound was right. It’s difficult while reading
about a battle at sea to really picture the chaos and the smoke; it’s
even more difficult to imagine the sounds–the booming of the guns, the
shouting, the small-arms fire, the rattle of splinters hitting the deck.

Next, the tone was right. It would be impossible for a two-hour movie to
capture all the richness and nuances of a twenty-volume series, and to
his credit Peter Weir chose to focus on just one aspect. The movie is a
sea-story from start to finish. The ship is right, the foremast hands
are right, the weather is right, Killick’s grumbling is right, Tom
Pullings is perfect (though William Mowett is a little too old), and the
incidental details are (almost all) right. Jack
is the competent leader of men and expert seaman; Stephen is the
physician and naturalist. The other aspects of their characters simply
do not appear.

Best of all, the movie makes no attempt to explain or to provide
background. It simply tells a story; if you know the background you can
enjoy it that much more. In particular, it doesn’t simplify the
background so that it can be manageably explained within the movie.

In short, Weir and company made a movie that will enhance my future
enjoyment of O’Brian’s series, and that’s no small thing.

All of that said, there are a number of things I simply have to gripe
about.

The first is the casting of Billy Boyd as Aubrey’s coxswain, Barrett
Bonden. Boyd captures Bonden’s cheerfulness well-enough, and I can’t
fault his acting. But damn it, Bonden’s supposed to be a champion boxer,
not a hobbit. Every time Boyd came on screen I could hear Gandalf saying,
“Fool of a Took!” Actually, I can’t remember whether Boyd played Merry
or Pippin; the two characters have so far been roughly interchangeable in
Jackson’s movies.

The second is the actor who played Stephen Maturin. Maturin is supposed
to look older than he really is, and have a forbidding eye. The actor
they chose looks far too boyish. He played the role well, though the
script didn’t show off Maturin’s sense of humor.

Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey was a little too good to be true, though that
was the fault of the script, not Crowe’s acting, which was excellent. My
favorite moment is when Aubrey looks over the rail at a lovely Brazilian
girl–not long after we see him writing a letter to his darling wife
Sophie. For just a few seconds the air is full of sexual tension–Aubrey
knows he has no time for dalliance, but oh if things were different. In
that single moment Weir illuminates an important side of Aubrey’s
personality that would otherwise have been ignored.

But Weir’s Jack Aubrey is a little too fond of making rousing speeches to
the crew, and a little too witty. In the scene where Aubrey tells of how
the great Admiral Nelson once asked him “in the most natural way” to pass
the salt, Weir has Aubrey play it for laughs–and very well, too–which
strikes me as wrong. It’s a bit of narrative straight from one of the
books, and I’ve always read it as Aubrey telling the story perfectly
straight–aware, of course, that the remark is trivial, but nevertheless
impressed with the great man’s manner, and with his politeness to a young
officer.

Maturin also gets his share of absurdities.
Weir turns O’Brian’s novel into a story of pride. Aubrey, we find, has
exceeded his orders by following the Acheron past Brazil; he
intends to capture the privateer come what may. It therefore falls to
Maturin to argue with Aubrey over whether they should turn back, and the
discussion grows quite heated. And yet, that’s entirely wrong. As
ship’s surgeon, Maturin would have given Captain Aubrey his opinion of
the health of the crew and the need for fresh food, and would have argued
passionately about making landfall if it were necessary for that reason.
As a republican and philosopher, he’d occasionally make remarks, more in
irritation than in anger, about the hierarchical nature of the navy.
And as Jack’s friend he might have asked, calmly and without anger, whether
they ought to turn back, and his friend Jack would have answered in the
same vein. He’d never presume to question Jack’s command of the
ship–except where botanizing and naturalizing is concerned.

The scene in which Stephen remonstrates with Jack for breaking his
promise about spending a week at the Galapagos Islands is straight out of
O’Brian’s novel–but even that isn’t played quite right. Stephen knows
perfectly well that all such promises are subject to the requirements of
the service (though he’d rather not admit it), and Jack’s perfectly
correct that Stephen’s completely
irresponsible about time while he’s gathering specimens. Thus, Stephen’s
speech should have much less cold anger and much more pique–in the book
it remains a serious disagreement, but it also provides some comic relief.

Nevertheless, Weir and company did a fine job. If they weren’t quite
true to the spirit of O’Brian’s books, I think they were as true as they
could have been within the bounds of producing a salable movie. I don’t
know how the movie will strike someone who has never read O’Brian’s work,
but it worked pretty well for me.