Master and Commander:
Journey to the Far side of the World
Peter Weir

Stephen Nash

Based on two of the novels by Patrick O'Brian and starring Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, this is a daring and enjoyable film. From the posters advertising the film you would have been led to expect a simple tale of 'derring-do' on the high seas. In fact the film is this and much more.

With advances in film technology has come the opportunity for a more naturalistic rendering of previous historical periods. For me the film should rank alongside Saving Private Ryan in its recreation of gritty historical experience. The camera is allowed to dwell over the artefacts of an 18th century British man-o'-war. The claustrophobic existence on board one of these ships has never been so well explored. For the first time you realise why it was Nelson had lost an arm and an eye and had died at Trafalgar. The battles that were fought at sea during the period were brutal and were meant to be decisive.

It is this decisiveness that provides the film with its great action sequences and this might lead you to think of the film as yet another action movie with Crowe merely transferring his Gladiator role from Ancient Rome to Nelson's navy. And yet the action is merely a backdrop to a more rounded exploration of men at sea set in a specific historical period.

The central relationship on board the ship is that between the Captain Jack Aubrey and the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. The two are friends and yet are opposites in background and nature. Aubrey is a man of the navy who is respected by the crew precisely because he understands their world so well. He realises that discipline has to be tempered with humanity if it is not to become tyranny. Maturin, sensitively played by Paul Bettany, is a product of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. He has an interest in natural science and is in many ways an outsider in the navy.

The film explores the tensions between the two men and their different philosophies through two interlinked and conflicting purposes for the voyage. One is the interception and destruction of French man-o'-war the Auberon, and the second is for Maturin to explore the Galapagos Islands. Ultimately war takes precedence, as Maturin has to abandon his scientific work on the islands when the Auberon is sighted, but not without dropping a few hints as to future discoveries. Ultimately the friendship between the two men can only find true harmony in their musical duets when words are abandoned and music takes over.

In adapting two of the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian, Peter Weir has taken a brave step. O'Brian wrote some twenty novels in the series, and such is the painstaking detail that they are widely considered to comprise a masterpiece of the historical imagination. Rather than attempting to situate people from the present within past historical periods O'Brian recreates the whole social milieu including the way that people thought at the time.

This makes demands upon the contemporary cinema audience are rarely made. By giving us Maturin as well as Aubrey, O'Brian was able to paint a picture of the intellectual excitement and turmoil of the eighteenth century. Maturin is a man whose hopes for a new world have been dashed by the political defeats that followed the French Revolution. He takes solace within the world of natural science but ultimately his is a world of disappointment.

Weir can only hint at this intellectual history, but he does enough to indicate his sensitivity to the world he is trying to portray. At a time when, as some commentators have noted, we seem to live in an ever-recurring present, and when today's conception of the human condition has become so naturalised that we imagine life was always like this, it is difficult for a contemporary audience to grasp the past.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are men of their time and Patrick O'Brian's great achievement has been to portray that world without looking through the prism of the present. I am sure most people will have experienced the film as a slightly disjointed action movie. Where for instance was the romantic interest? It is however the incongruity of the film that is its point. It is to Peter Weir's credit that he has captured as much of it as he has.