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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, November 14, 2003

Masterful Crowe turns in commanding performance in sea epic

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (PG-13) Four Stars (Excellent)

The eagerly awaited sea adventure is the first film made from the score of best-selling novels by Patrick O'Brian, and it's all anyone could have ever hoped for. Russell Crowe is the ideal captain under intelligent, artful director Peter Weir. 20th Century Fox, 136 minutes.

When your character is called master and commander, you'd better be a take-charge guy. That's Russell Crowe from stem to stern in Peter Weir's grand sea epic, "Master and Commander — The Far Side of the World." When a friend saw how Crowe portrayed 19th century British sea captain Jack Aubrey, he suggested that they ought to show this film at management seminars.

"Lucky Jack" is a courageous and wily warrior, a natural leader of men, a tolerably good fiddle-player and an amusingly bad punster. And his men love him and will follow him across the seas to do battle against impossible odds for king and country. Mark down another impressive larger-than-life achievement for the chameleon Australian actor.

This eagerly awaited sea adventure — the first film made from the score of best-selling novels by Patrick O'Brian — is all anyone could have ever hoped for. Like O'Brian's thickly and precisely detailed books, Weir's film revels in fascinating period imagery and sometimes-archaic turn-of-the-19th-century dialogue, along with the robust cannon fire and bloody swordplay that is the necessary fodder for any tale of action before the mast.

Weir has long been expert at putting exotic and unusual worlds on the screen — remember the Indonesia of "The Year of Living Dangerously," the Amish country of "Witness" and the plastic artificiality of "The Truman Show"?

Here he provides a view of the crowded and meticulously ordered life aboard a three-masted British frigate of the Napoleonic era. Nearly 100 men share deck and sleeping quarters on a ship barely the length of half a football field. In a sense, "Master and Commander" is "Das Boot," 150 years earlier. In that classic World War II submarine film, men are crowded into a small, claustrophobic space and do battle despite a badly damaged ship. And their captain is nearly as charismatic and forceful as Aubrey.

Weir's movie bears a title nearly longer than the ship because it's largely based on two of O'Brian's 20 novels, "Master and Commander" and "The Far Side of the World." At this point in his naval career, Aubrey commands the HMS Surprise and is pursuing a larger, better-armed French frigate in the waters off South America and around the Galapagos Islands. It is 1805, and England is at war with Napoleon's France. At Aubrey's side as friend, confidant, ship's doctor and (sometimes) ship's conscience, Stephen Maturin (played with subtle grace by Paul Bettany, Crowe's imaginary college roommate in "A Beautiful Mind.") He offers the counterpoint of restraint.

But it's the two talented Australians — director Weir and star Crowe — who steer this $150 million enterprise to a rousing victory on the high seas. Rated PG-13, with battle violence and gore.