![]() And as such, the film has something of an upstairs-downstairs quality in its acute examinations of the quotidian aspects of the lives of everyone from Captain Jack to the prepubescent underlings working below deck. But despite the stitched together nature of the screenwriting, Weir and company weave the various events together quite seamlessly into a cohesive whole, presenting them as all occurring during the same mission to track down the Acheron. ![]() The vignette-driven approach of the film stems from the screenplay’s combining of events from three of Patrick O’Brian’s 20 novels centered on the exploits of Jack Aubrey. But even this pursuit-which involves three direct encounters (only one of which actually builds into an extended battle scene) scattered throughout the film’s 138-minute runtime-is frequently disrupted by a series of digressions delivered in the form of mini-narratives, including a visit to the Galapagos islands and the demise of a young midshipman, Hollom (Lee Ingleby), who is unfairly blamed for a stretch of bad luck thanks to the crew’s intensifying hunger and brewing superstitions. There is, obviously, British Captain Jack Aubrey’s (Crowe) dogged pursuit of the elusive French vessel, the Acheron, to anchor the narrative. But in the intervening 20 years, and upon a rewatch, it’s clear you don’t need Crowe’s tweet to suspect that today’s audiences would be even more strongly divided by a film so firmly committed to verisimilitude through a remarkable accumulation of minute social, historical and even biological details that many modern moviegoers would certainly find themselves wondering “But where’s the story?” ![]() I mention box office and Oscars not because they actually matter, but because even in 2003, the film was still something of a love it or hate it affair. Now, Master & Commander didn’t exactly set the world on fire in terms of its early-aughts’ audience response (though it more than made its money back), but it went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Cinematography and, to this day, continues to have a small but impassioned group of defenders. Of course, their mistake was tagging the lead actor, Russell Crowe, who responded in kind, saying kids today have no focus, going on to defend Weir’s film as “an exacting, detail-oriented epic tale” that’s “definitely an adult’s movie.” If Crowe’s broad swipe at youth culture sounds like the type of crotchety old man defending-his-turf attack that often surfaces when older generations begin to feel irrelevant, he’s absolutely not wrong about Master & Commander-a film that is ambitious in its fervent, almost obsessive, attention to detail and one that’s also impossible to imagine being made (or widely appreciated) today, even for a fraction of its original $150 million budget. ![]() In early 2021, Peter Weir’s 2003 seafaring adventure film, Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, surprisingly became a trending topic on Twitter after a young user suggested watching it as a palliative for those suffering from insomnia during the pandemic.
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