"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" is half swashbuckling action movie, half detailed examination of life in the 19th-century British navy, and all entertaining. While I love films from the same period as "Damn the Defiant", "Captain Horatio Hornblower", "Mutiny on the Bounty" and the like, clearly "Master and Commander" is superior when it comes to accurately portraying the life of a seaman. Well done in every way and the director really deserves kudos for this one. The acting is lovely as well-understated but quite realistic. It also has the best looking sea footage you can find in a period film-especially when the ship is rounding the Cape (it must have been amazing on the big screen). The film looks great-with a lot of attention to details and accuracy. Overall, while this film is very slowly and deliberately paced (which will obviously turn off some viewers), the film is so expertly crafted that for a reasonably patient viewer, it should be a very engaging film. I could talk about them, but frankly this would spoil the suspense. Along the way, there are lots of adventures-mostly of the variety you might actually have seen during the era. However, instead of running, Crowe plays a very determined man-and spends much of the film hunting down this ship. His ship has encountered a larger and faster French vessel and managed to escape. The action is set aboard a British Naval ship commanded by Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe). The Brits and French have been fighting off and on for almost a decade (and would continue to do so until 1815). After all, it would be a hard sell in the large American market to get the audiences to root for the British Navy in this altercation! The story occurs around the beginning of the 19th century. As a retired history teacher, this is the sort of stuff I love-even if in the original, the 'bad guys' were actually the Americans and it was set during the War of 1812! I assume they changed the enemy to the French to make the film more marketable. Instead, they seemed to be doing the impossible-make a film that tries very hard to replicate what life was like at sea back during the Napoleonic Wars. "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" is a very unusual film because the filmmakers obviously were not attempting to make yet another Hollywood style blockbuster.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |