|
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
|
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a 2003 film directed by Peter Weir and starring Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, with Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin. It is adapted from three novels in the Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. PlayStation: The Official Magazine called the film "one of the great war movies of our era..."[1]
Plot introduction
Captain Aubrey of the British sailing warship HMS Surprise must pursue a French privateer, which is larger, faster and stronger than his own ship, into the Pacific Ocean. Between naval battle scenes, the film focuses on the customs and hardships of life aboard a Royal Navy ship at the turn of the 19th century. It also deals with the peculiar friendship between Aubrey and the ship's surgeon, Stephen Maturin. A subplot involves Maturin's unofficial role as a naturalist, and his desire to explore the Galapagos Islands to examine its renowned fauna and flora; a goal which is hindered by his ship's official military duties. Aubrey's obsessive chase stresses his ship, his crew, and his friendship with Maturin. Confrontations with the more powerful adversary test Aubrey's cunning and resolve.
Plot summary
In 1805, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Aubrey of the Royal Navy frigate, HMS Surprise is ordered to pursue and destroy the French privateer Acheron, bound for the Pacific.
In the opening scene, a midshipman briefly sees a dark shape in a fog bank and, after a moment's hesitation, raises the alarm and the captain is called. When nothing happens, the threat is dismissed. Aubrey tells the midshipman that he still did 'the right thing'. But as Aubrey scans the fog bank with his spyglass, the Surprise is suddenly raked by cannon fire. The Acheron appears and the Surprise is hit repeatedly, causing severe damage and many casualties. As the Acheron maneuvers to fire upon them again, Aubrey orders the Surprise to be towed into the fog bank where she evades the Acheron.
After inspecting the damage, Aubrey decides to refit the ship as best they can at sea, and pursue the Acheron. The crew works to repair the ship while Dr. Maturin works hard to save the lives of the casualties including a young midshipman, whose arm he has to amputate. The Surprise resumes its pursuit but the Acheron again surprises them and they begin a day long pursuit. As night falls, the faster Acheron begins firing. By placing lights on a decoy raft -resembling the stern lanterns of the Surprise- they again evade the Acheron.
As they approach Cape Horn, the Surprise is closely following the Acheron, but they lose sight of the Acheron as both ships bring in sail in rising winds. When the mizzen top mast breaks and falls into the sea, a sailor falls in with it. The crew shout to him to swim to the mast to avoid drowning, but when they realize that the drag of the mast in the water is causing the ship to list dangerously, Aubrey makes the painful decision to cut the mast loose, thus abandoning the man to his fate.
Aubrey tells his officers that he is heading for the Galapagos Islands, where he is certain the Acheron will be as that it is where Britain’s whaling fleet may be found. Maturin later tells Aubrey that the Galapagos are legendary to Naturalists such as himself. Aubrey promises the doctor that he will be granted several days of exploring on the islands.
When the Surprise reaches the islands, they find and recover the surviving crew of the Albatross, a whaling ship, burned by a “big, black three-master”. Jack orders all hands to make sail to pursue the Acheron. This annoys the Doctor, who protests that Aubrey is breaking his word to let him explore, at which point the Captain replies that "we do not have time for your damned hobbies sir!"
Some days into their voyage from the Galapagos, Surprise is becalmed. The dead heat is starting to affect the crew to the point where they believe there is a bad omen on board. They single out a Midshipman, Hollom, as a Jonah, citing that the Acheron first appeared on his watch and also that he was scaling the mizzen when it broke above him at Cape Horn. A seaman Nagle is disrespectful and insubordinate towards Hollom. Aubrey witnesses this and orders that Nagle be arrested and flogged for disobedience, and later chastises the weak-hearted Hollom for failing to prevent this.
Later Hollom, believing himself to be the Jonah as he has been involved in many unfortunate incidents on the voyage, commits suicide by jumping into the ocean, clasping a cannon ball. Eerily, the winds pick up soon afterward.
Dr. Maturin is accidentally shot by Marine Captain Howard (trying to shoot a bird), and loses consciousness. The surgeon's mate informs Jack that unless the bullet can be removed Maturin will die, but to safely perform the surgery they need to be on land. A sail is spotted on the horizon ahead, believed to be the Acheron. Aubrey is now faced with a difficult choice: follow the ship, or save his friend. When Stephen regains consciousness, he realizes that they have returned to the Galapagos and Aubrey has abandoned his pursuit in order to save him.
The Doctor performs the surgery on himself with the aid of a mirror. He succeeds in removing the musket ball and recovers quickly. He now has the opportunity to explore the Galapagos. He makes many scientific discoveries, including a type of flightless cormorant. From the top of a hill, he notices a large three-masted ship sailing into one of the island bays flying the French flag. The Acheron has returned. The Doctor is crestfallen that his trek will now be cut short but knows that he must return to the Surprise and inform Aubrey. During their return to camp, Maturin's bullet wound slows him down, forcing Padeen, his assistant, to release the specimens and carry the Doctor back to camp.
After observing the deceptive qualities of one of Maturin's specimens -a stick insect- Aubrey has an idea to disguise the Surprise as a whaling ship. The Acheron takes the bait and chases the Surprise. As the French ship comes alongside, the Surprise opens fire and the Acheron’s mainmast falls, the Surprise crosses the Acheron's stern, raking her and inflicting many casualties and upsetting her cannon.
Leaving the Surprise, Jack and Lieutenant Pullings lead boarding parties onto the Acheron, but are ambushed themselves. Master Allen, Nagle and many of the Surprise’s crew are killed.
After seizing control of the ship, Aubrey searches the Acheron for her captain and is directed to the sickbay, where a man introducing himself as Docteur de Vigny tells him that the French captain has been killed. The Acheron and Surprise are repaired. Jack gives command of the Acheron to Pullings, naming him ‘Captain’ Pullings, and orders him to take the French ship to Valparaiso, while the Surprise returns to the Galapagos.
As the Acheron sails away, Aubrey tells Maturin of his talk with de Vigny. Maturin tells him that the Acheron's doctor had died months ago. Aubrey then realizes that the Captian was pretending to be the doctor. Aubrey gives orders to pursue the Acheron, and Maturin is again denied the chance to explore the Galapagos. Aubrey then wryly notes that since the bird Maturin seeks is flightless, "it isn't going anywhere."
Adaptation
The film is constructed from episodes from several novels in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. The main plot, in which Aubrey in HMS Surprise chases an enemy frigate round Cape Horn into the Pacific, is based loosely on The Far Side of the World, but the American frigate USS Norfolk in the book becomes the American-built French privateer Acheron in the film (the Acheron is based on 44-gun American frigates like the USS Constitution). The stern chase around Cape Horn is taken from the novel Desolation Island, although the Acheron replaced the Dutch ship of the line Waakzaamheid, the Surprise replaced the Leopard and in the book it is Aubrey who is being pursued around the Cape of Good Hope. The episode in which Aubrey deceives the enemy by means of a raft bearing lanterns is taken from Master and Commander, and the episode in which Maturin operates on himself to remove a bullet is taken from HMS Surprise.
The film is largely faithful in plot to the novels, although there are a few major departures from the series. In the movie, Stephen Maturin inadvertently gives Jack Aubrey the inspiration to disguise Surprise as a whaling ship to fool an enemy, implying that this is a new idea for Aubrey. However, in the first Aubrey/Maturin book Master and Commander, Aubrey regularly uses the tactic of disguising his ship during his very first command, and it is described as a common tactic used by warships to approach unsuspecting targets and avoid attention from larger enemy ships. The exploit of setting up a decoy of a large ship at night by attaching lights to a small boat was executed by the French privateer Robert Surcouf to successfully escape the British frigate HMS Sybille. It was also used by Lord Cochrane and described in his Autobiography of a Seaman, which was used by Patrick O'Brian as source material for his novel Master and Commander. In that novel, Jack Aubrey's first command, HMS Sophie escapes by using this tactic, while in the film it is Surprise which escapes Acheron using this trick.
The movie omits Dr. Maturin's additional occupation as an intelligence agent for the English government. Since the movie takes place almost entirely aboard ship, and civilization is rarely encountered, there may not have been any opportunity for Maturin to engage in intelligence work. A hint of his secret profession is given early in the film, when he suggests to Aubrey that the enemy ship may have known of their mission from French spies.
The movie gives the impression that Jack Aubrey promotes his first lieutenant, Pullings, who receives his new captaincy with joy. In fact only the Admiralty could make such promotions, and the difficulty obtaining them is a recurring theme in the books. This was especially true for men such as Pullings, who as a member of a lower class without money or social connections might spend years hoping in vain for advancement. It was, however, possible for Captains (such as Aubrey) to make a lieutenant an Acting Captain for the duration of the commission — which was usually until the ship (in this case, the captured Acheron) arrived with all-important dispatches back in London (something which usually merited a promotion), and which is where Pullings is bound for — eventually — at the end of the film.
In the novel, Pullings has already been promoted to Commander, but has not yet been given a command of his own. He accompanied Captain Aubrey on this mission in order to avoid being left on shore with nothing to do, as well as improve his prospects for being given command of a ship by demonstrating his zeal for king and country.
Nowhere in the Aubrey/Maturin series of novels is Dr. Maturin shot by a Royal Marine. However, in the novel H.M.S. Surprise, Maturin fights a duel with a Mr. Canning, a rival for the affections for Diana Villiers. Although Maturin is deadly with both sword and pistol, and kills Canning, he is wounded in the exchange and operates on himself to remove the deflected bullet from his chest.
The film also plays out the role of Hollom as a Jonah to a much greater extent. Hollom is shown ending his life by jumping over the side with a cannonball in his hands, whereas in the book he is presumed murdered by Horner, the ship's Gunner, when Hollom instigates and consummates an affair with Horner's wife. This romantic triangle was removed from the plot in the film.
The first two and final three chapters of The Far Side of the World do not appear in the film. Also, the prominent scene of Warley being sacrificed on the order of Capt. Aubrey does not appear in any of the books, and a substantial majority of the movie dialog is created by scriptwriters Weir and Collee.
Box office history
The movie opened #2 in the first weekend of North American release, Nov. 14-16, 2003, grossing $25,105,990. It dropped to the #4 position in the second weekend and #6 in the third, and finished the domestic run with $93,926,386 in gross receipts. Outside of the U.S. and Canada the movie grossed $116,550,000, doing best in Italy (at $15,111,841) with an overall worldwide total of $210.5 million.[2] As of Oct. 2007, this puts the film at #307 on the all-time worldwide gross ranking (unadjusted for inflation.)
Sequel outlook
There are currently no announced plans for a sequel to be made by movie-rights holder 20th Century Fox, despite the remaining 20 books available in the Aubrey-Maturin series. Although Russell Crowe is not under contract for another film, he is reportedly interested in making one. Most of the rest of the cast is reported to be under contract for two more films; a common procedure for movie studios when signing up for a film, whether a sequel is made or not, in order to ensure much of the original cast comes back.[3]
Cast
- Captain Jack Aubrey .... Russell Crowe
- Dr. Stephen Maturin .... Paul Bettany
- First Lt. Thomas Pullings .... James D'Arcy
- Second Lt. William Mowett .... Edward Woodall
- Captain Howard, Royal Marines .... Chris Larkin
- Midshipman William Blakeney .... Max Pirkis
- Midshipman Boyle .... Jack Randall
- Midshipman Peter Myles Calamy .... Max Benitz
- Midshipman Hollom .... Lee Ingleby
- Midshipman Williamson .... Richard Pates
- Mr. Allen, Sailing Master .... Robert Pugh
- Mr. Higgins, Surgeon's Mate .... Richard McCabe
- Mr. Hollar, Boatswain .... Ian Mercer
- Mr. Lamb, Carpenter .... Tony Dolan
- Preserved Killick, Captain's Steward .... David Threlfall
- Barret Bonden, Captain's Coxswain.... Billy Boyd
- Joseph Nagle, Carpenter's Mate .... Bryan Dick
- William Warley, Captain of Mizzentop .... Joseph Morgan
- Joe Plaice, Able Seaman .... George Innes
- Michael Doudle, Able Seaman .... William Mannering
- Awkward Davies, Able Seaman .... Patrick Gallagher
- Nehemiah Slade, Able Seaman .... Alex Palmer
- Mr. Hogg, Whaler .... Mark Lewis Jones
- Padeen Colman, Loblolly Boy .... John DeSantis
- Black Bill, Steward's Mate .... Ousmane Thiam
- Young Sponge....Kostas Kurelias
- Captain of the Acheron .... Thierry Segall
- Private Trollope .... Aidan Black
- Jemmy Ducks .... Sebastian Grubb
Awards
- Won, Best Cinematography, Russell Boyd
- Won, Best Sound Effects Editing, Richard King
- Nominated, Best Picture
- Nominated, Best Director, Peter Weir
- Nominated, Best Art Direction
- Nominated, Best Sound Mixing
- Nominated, Best Costume Design
- Nominated, Best Film Editing
- Nominated, Best Visual Effects
- Nominated, Best Makeup
Master and Commander was released the same year as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which won every award of the eleven that it was nominated for. The two awards that Master and Commander won were in categories that The Return of the King was not nominated for.
2003 National Board of Review
Soundtrack
The score includes an assortment of baroque and classical music, notably the first of Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, played by Yo-Yo Ma; the third (Adagio) movement of Corelli's Christmas Concerto (Concerto grosso in G minor, Op. 6, No. 8); and a recurring rendition of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The music played on cello before the end is Luigi Boccherini's String Quintet (Quintettino) for 2 violins, viola & 2 cellos in C major ("La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid"), G. 324 Op. 30. The two arrangements of this cue contained in the CD differ significantly from the one heard in the movie.
The song sung in the wardroom is Don't Forget Your Old Shipmates. The tunes sung and played by the crew on deck at night are Spanish Ladies and Rob Roy.
Several scenes of the film featured music on the Irish uilleann pipes by Tim Foley, of the band Skelpin.
Historical authenticity
A screenshot from the film.
The film's special edition DVD release contains behind-the-scenes material giving useful insights into the film-making process. Great efforts were made to reproduce the authentic look and feel of life aboard an early nineteenth-century man-of-war. Much of the filming actually took place at sea on board Rose (a reproduction of the 18th-century frigate HMS Rose), while other scenes were shot on a full-scale replica mounted on gimbals in a large tank. The Rose is now renamed HMS Surprise in honor of her movie role and moored at the San Diego Maritime Museum as a dockside attraction (and recently returned to regular sailing status.) There was a third HMS Surprise which was a scale model built by Weta Workshop. A storm sequence was enhanced using digitally-composited footage of waves actually shot on board a modern replica of Cook's Endeavour rounding Cape Horn. All of the actors were given a thorough grounding in the naval life of the period in order to make their performances as authentic as possible. The ship's boats used in the film were Russian Naval six- and four-oared yawls supplied by Central Coast Charters and Boat Base Monterey. Their faithful 18th century appearance complemented the historic accuracy of the rebuilt "Rose", whose own boat, the "Thorn" could be used only in the Brazilian scene.
Books about the movie
- 2003, UK, The Making of "Master and Commander": The "Far Side of the World", HarperCollins Entertainment (ISBN 0-00-715771-1), Pub date 6 October 2003, Paperback
- 2003, USA, The Making of "Master and Commander": The "Far Side of the World", W W Norton & Co Ltd (ISBN 0-393-05865-4), Pub date 6 October 2003, Hardback
References
- ^ From a review in the section titled “Blu-ray Central: A whole lot of B-movies, plus a Bee Movie!” in PlayStation: The Official Magazine 009 (August 2008): 17.
- ^ Box Office Mojo. "Box Office History".
- ^ "Master and Commnader Sequel?". Retrieved on 2008-08-19.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
|
