Master and
Commander
I may
have inadvertently given the impression that I thought that Pirates of the Caribbean was the best
movie ever. I did, of course, intend to award this distinction to Master and Commander.
The film
is based on an extremely clever conceit. It takes basic tropes familiar to us
from Star Trek and re-imagines them
in the 'age of sail' navy. Russell Crowe is basically in the Picard role, loved
by his crew, agonizing, but coming to the right decision. Dr Maturin never
actually says 'He's dead, Jack' or 'Dammit, Jack I'm a botanist, not a doctor',
but you feel at any moment that he might. Where Picard stands by the
view-screen trying to spot Klingons through their cloaking device, Aubrey looks
down his telescope and tries to spot Frenchmen in the fog. Like Picard, he is
faced with a terrible moment where he has to decide whether to sacrifice one
crewman to save the ship. The idea of dilithium crystals that run dry at
dramatic moments is turned into adverse winds that be-calm the good ship
Surprise when the plot requires it. Carpenters, rather than engineers, say that
the ship can't possibly be repaired in less than a month, to which the Captain
says 'Then there's not a moment to lose.' Although they are not literally
seeking out new life and new civilization, Maturin is also a scientist whose
primary interest is in collecting new species on the planets, sorry, islands
they visit. And of course, one of his discoveries—an insect that disguises
itself as a leaf to avoid predators—gives the Captain the clue as to how to
defeat the French who (of course) out-man and out-gun them. (They disguise
themselves as a harmless whaler, a sort of low-tech version of the corbonite
maneuver.)
Star Trek on the open seas. It's such a cool
idea that I wonder no-one has thought of it before.
I have
only read one Patrick O'Brien book. It was the one where Aubrey wins a battle
against the French by a combination of skill, courage, leadership and sheer
bloody daring. It was okay, I guess. I felt that the people who say he writes
better than Jane Austen might have been over stating the case, slightly. I see
why wannabee sea-dogs like them, but I was rather cut adrift by the total
absence of anything I could recognize as a plot.
Although
I'm sure that O'Brien enthusiasts (Paddies?) feel about Master and Commander the way I do about Two Towers, to my non-fan
eye, the film felt very like the book. There's lots and lots of incident, but
no actual narrative, almost as if you were watching a working simulation of the
Nelsonic navy. Being a film rather than a book, all the exposition about when
precisely you would want to settle away your topsail fore lines is omitted, for
which we mortals are very thankful. Poor Dr
Maturin has to ask what the 'weather gauge' means at one point, but
never gets a straight answer.
I found
the film absorbing from beginning to end. Rather like X-Men 2, it felt as if I had been dropped more or less at random
into an ongoing sequence of events, and then kicked out again at an arbitrary
stopping point. I would happily have stayed the voyage for another several
hours. I particularly like the way in which, without much back-story or
exposition, almost every crewmember was individualized. You didn't know their
names ('the cute kid, the other cute kid, the old man, the fat officer,
the hobbit') but you did know which was
which. The scene after the battle, where the camera scans along the dead bodies
as they are sewn up into their hammocks for burial was genuinely affecting—and
quite unsentimental. How many movies have you seen recently where half the cast
are killed off pointlessly without getting to do a big significant death
scenes?
It was a
deeply brave film for Hollywood to have made. It starts on ship in the middle
of the ocean, and, discounting a brief sojourn on the Galapagos Islands where
Dr Maturin narrowly fails to become Charles Darwin, it stays on the ship. There
is not one single female character. The plot consists of 'They chase a French
ship. In the end, they catch it. The end'. There are no concessions, in short,
to be any other than a blood and testosterone soaked sea story. No-one says
'follow your heart' or 'you can do anything if you try'. The battles are brutal
and bloody. Hardly any swashes are buckled. No elves turn up at the last minute
and no one gets their ear licked by a horse.
From my
brief encounter with the book, I felt that Aubrey had been liberalized,
somewhat. This character does have a fellow flogged for failing to salute an
officer, but he agonizes about it first. I seem to recall that the guy in the
book flogs routinely and has a crewman hanged for buggery. If I remembered that
wrong, I will get hate mail from the Paddies.
The
trailers screened along with Master and
Commander warned us of impending films about American soldiers becoming
Samurai and CGI re-staging of Homer. Oh, and something about a hobbit. Could it
be that the net result of Fellowship of
the Ring has been, not a flood of crap fantasy but an influx of good,
honest, violent epics of the kind that they don't make any more?
Egad. I
may have to stop being cynical about the cinema.