That pretty much describes Capt. Aubrey, or "Lucky Jack" to his crew and fellow officers aboard the HMS Surprise. Sent to the Southern Hemisphere to locate Napoleon’s warship and "take it as a prize," he soon learns the French vessel outsails, outguns and outruns their smaller ship. When the Acheron sneaks up on his vessel and starts pounding away, the resulting damage to the HMS Surprise should be enough to send Aubrey’s crew back to England. But Capt. Jack is determined to play cat-and-mouse with the slippery French ship known as The Phantom.
Crowe is not in Oscar-bait mode here, but does manage to use his considerable bulk and beefiness to project courage, determination and conviction in Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (Let’s just shorten it to that, and do away with endlessly long titles that fill up two marquee lines). Master and Commander (or M&C, to make it even shorter) resurrects a genre that seemed to have sunk back in the 1960s, but is now making a comeback with hits like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, the sea epic. Hollywood legends are made of the costly shoots, the sunken sets, the bloated budgets and the unfortunate deaths of extras in sea epics of the past. Fortunately, M&C was mostly filmed in a big tank, and avoids a lot of the more egregious Hollywood clichés, substituting instead clichés from an even earlier era – those of honor and loyalty to the British crown, qualities abounding in adventure novels from 19th century.
It’s 1805 and the HMS Surprise is on the chase. Napoleon’s armies are threatening to invade England, and the biggest battles are fought at sea. That’s all you really need to know to get into the story, which begins at a drifting pace but gradually builds up a good strong wind.
Details are important to suspend your disbelief in M&C, and fortunately director Weir has a brilliant eye for detail. Like Ridley Scott, he excels in creating fully-imagined worlds. The scenes of the Galapagos alone – with its exotic, co-existing species of birds, lizards and bugs – is enough to lend authenticity to this tale. But it’s life aboard the Surprise that most convinces, from the cramped below-deck quarters to the motley crew (no clichés here, just a mix of old sea dogs and young lads seeking the officer class). Far from the "rum, sodomy and the lash" which Winston Churchill claimed characterized the Royal Navy, Aubrey and Stephen practice cello and violin duets together most nights. (The music in M&C is mercifully tasteful: no sweeping Hollywood scores, just decorous use of Bach’s Cello Suite in G Major.)
Then there’s the treachery of the sea and the phantoms hiding within it. Throughout his work, Peter Weir has depicted man against elemental (sometimes tribal) forces of nature. The Mosquito Coast (1986) put Harrison Ford and his family up against a South American jungle, while the lingering image from Fearless (1993) was of Jeff Bridges wandering through broken corn fields, a bewildered survivor of a devastating plane crash. In Witness (1984), Harrison Ford (again) played a fish-out-of-water cop hiding in an Amish village, while in Dead Poets’ Society (1989), even the pastoral fields surrounding a private boy’s school threatened to extinguish the students’ individuality. In The Truman Show (1998), the forces of nature were man-made (designed by TV producer Christof), but no less fickle and indifferent.
Inevitably, it’s the fickle nature of the sea that plays havoc in Master and Commander, but that’s only one of the forces at work. Several good action scenes buoy this tale, including an escape from broadside guns in a fog bank and a chase cut short by killer sea storms. Along the way, storms plaguing the minds and hearts of the crew prove just as deadly (and no one depicts suicide as chillingly as Weir does), and, as you would expect, even Captain Jack has to come to grips with some personal demons.
Mostly, he has to ask himself whether he’s pursuing the Acheron out of some mad, Ahab-like zeal, or, as he maintains, out of "duty" to the British crown. Master and Commander is based on a series of popular novels, but the level of dialogue or psychological insight never gets deeper than Aubrey deciding whether to flog an insubordinate crewman or trading banter with Dr. Stephen. This is odd, because Crowe is just the type of actor who can suggest all sorts of deep character richness just by a movement of his eyebrows or wave of his hands. But let’s face it: in a sea-chase epic such as this, you don’t want to get too bogged down in character. Suffice to say, Crowe is masterful and commanding when the need arises.
There are stretches of tedium, too, at sea, and this occasionally leaves you glancing at your watch. But the script is just intelligent enough to keep you hanging on, even throwing in an extra bit of urgency at the end which could point toward a possible movie franchise. But that largely depends on whether this $90-million sea epic sinks – or sails –at the box office.