So here's a review I wrote of Master and Commander. I wanted to publish it in the Bagpipe, but for reasons of space constraint, that didn't work out. I wanted to put it in Pulse, but Pulse has a review policy that excludes my review. So here's the text.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a crew to make a man. A trite, but true notion, it puts Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the right context. While most adventure movies never move beyond the events of the story itself, Master and Commander goes further. As a film, it’s not just any old adventure movie; it is an adventure movie that manages to say a lot about who we are today in a depiction of the distant past.
All classic adventure movies have basically the same plot. The hero is caught in a sticky situation. He (and occasionally she) has to sink or swim. And swim he does. Through daring escapades, and tight scrapes, our adventure hero, saves himself, maybe the world, and definitely gets a girl.
As a basic narrative frameworks go, the adventure isn’t very helpful? These movies tell us that the world is saved by the greatness of an individual. At the heart of an adventure movie is a notion about a hero. Namely, that the hero is someone, who whether he knows it or not, has the capability within himself to conquer whatever life has in store. There is no mountain too great, no desert too dry, and no villain too dastardly, to thwart the hero’s inner gift to land upright on his own two feet.
While watching such a hero can be immensely satisfying, it isn’t a very good depiction of real life. No one is as resourceful as Macgyver, no one as tenacious as Indiana Jones, no one as strong as Rambo. All these classic adventure characters are pretty much loner’s. Having all the gifts they need inside themselves, they don’t need the help of others to get out of life’s more harrowing scrapes. Ironically, if we all tried to go it alone like these characters so often do, our ticket would be a fast-track to nowhere. We don’t have it within us to be these hero’s.
Master and Commander succeeds as it gives us a ship full of heroes. As a story, it’s about a Captain (Russell Crowe), his best friend the ship’s doctor (Paul Bettany), his crew (Including Billy Boyd, better known as Pippin from Lord of the Rings), and his ship (HMS Surprise). There’s a nemesis in a mysterious French privateer. But with the exception of two or three high intensity cat and mouse naval engagements, the rest of the two hour plus movie revolves around the complexity of relationships on a ship inhabited by nearly 200 men. These men struggle internally and between each other over a question of duty. How do we go about discharging our obligation to His Majesties Navy and more importantly to their homeland? Tensions over how to resolve this is seen in every relationship in the film from the top down.
As this film beautifully unfolds you see that everyone needs everyone in order to complete the task at hand, in order to discharge one’s duty. The captain needs his confidant ship’s doctor. The young need the old, and the old need the young. Victory doesn’t come from bringing out the best in others, but from finding out who others are. As it turns out, an adventure that tells us this about our heroic sides instead of our heroic idealizations ends up being much more satisfying.
Rather than having a ridiculously competent single super-hero to compare ourselves to, we have a super-hero crew, where every viewer can find where they fit in the whole, where their skills lie, what portion of greatness they have to offer.