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MASTER AND COMMANDER:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
Driven, charismatic Jack Aubrey, the captain
of HMS Surprise, engages in noble battle against the Acheron, a
mighty French vessel, off the coast of Brazil during the Napoleonic
Wars.
CAST: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd, James D'Arcy, Lee
Ingleby, George Innes, Max Pirkis, Mark Lewis Jones, Richard McCabe,
Robert Pugh, David Threlfall, Max Benitz
DIRECTOR: Peter Weir
 "The
battle sequences are filmed with impressive coherence and rigor,
but ‘Master and Commander’ is, if anything, most thrilling
between skirmishes…Mr. Bettany, sensitive, quick-witted and
easygoing, makes a fine sidekick for the fierce Mr. Crowe…Mr.
Weir's direction is appropriately old-fashioned, which is not to
say that it is staid...'Master and Commander’ hums with humor,
passion and life." --A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"…brawny, bloody, ridiculously over-budgeted seafaring
epic…a big bore, with so much mumbling by Russell Crowe that
it needs subtitles…I longed to rush home for a rerun of ‘All
the Brothers Were Valiant’ with Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger
and Ann Blyth, but this movie refused to end…The overrated
Russell Crowe still impresses me as an overgrown baby with cholic
who is always on the verge of spitting up its formula…Most
of his lines sound like they’re being swallowed with a mouth
full of porridge." --Rex Reed, The New York Observer
"…an exuberant sea adventure told with uncommon intelligence;
we're reminded of well-crafted classics before the soulless age
of computerized action…it re-creates the world of the British
navy circa 1805 with such detail and intensity that the sea battles
become stages for personality and character…There are scenes
at sea, including the rounding of Cape Horn, which are as good or
better as any sea journey ever filmed, and the battle scenes are
harrowing in their closeness and ferocity…‘Master and
Commander’ is grand and glorious, and touching in its attention
to its characters. Like the work of David Lean, it achieves the
epic without losing sight of the human, and to see it is to be reminded
of the way great action movies can rouse and exhilarate us, can
affirm life instead of simply dramatizing its destruction."
--Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"It plays like an earnest National Geographic mockup striving
to give us the flavor of periods and places past…Crowe and
Bettany were heaps more fun as a psychotic mathematician and his
fantasy toy-boy in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ than they are as
this pair of old biddies…a dull and boring film, pretty as
a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso
Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named Surprise find themselves
trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end."
--Ella Taylor, LA Weekly
 "…a
rousing high-seas adventure that sweeps you into another world…That
world has been rendered in vivid historical detail by director Peter
Weir… This isn't a theme park; it's a movie with the confidence
to let a story build. Bettany brings a keen gaze and sly humor to
the doc. He is a formidable match for Crowe, who continues to astonish
as an actor. Aubrey is fair-minded and well liked, and could be
as dull as the ship's bilge water. But Crowe -- fierce, funny and
every inch the hero -- gives a blazing star performance." Peter
Travers, Rolling Stone
"‘Master and Commander,’ directed by Peter Weir from
the first of the late Patrick O'Brian's 20 naval adventure novels,
is a spectacle at once burly and detached…the movie resounds
with muffled shouts and thundering cannonballs; it pre-supposes
a certain nautical interest or at least a taste for salty sea-dog
sing-alongs… Crowe delivers a star performance in his trademark
incarnation as the thoughtful roughneck…‘Master and Commander’
(why not ‘Belt and Suspenders’?) is amply stocked with
rote characterizations and conflicts; it alludes to the fantastic
discomfort of life at sea and delicately looks away…This is
an exercise in civility—a tasteful Boy's Life adventure."
-- J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"Bettany, squinting through his spectacles, offers a winning
blend of the eager and the retiring…some of Crowe’s line
readings are so low and growly that you must strain to catch them;
we have come a long way since the ocean was the province of lithe,
laughing hearties such as Burt Lancaster and Errol Flynn …What
the novels leave us with, and what emerges more fitfully from this
film, as if in shafts of sunlight, is the growing realization that,
although our existence is indisputably safer, softer, cleaner, and
more dependable than the lives led by Captain Aubrey and his men,
theirs were in some immeasurable way better—richer in possibility,
and more regularly entrancing to the eye and spirit alike."
--Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
"The film is an immersion tank of old-movie memories and attitudes
about heroism and fighting the good fight. As soothing as this can
be, it’s not enough—at least not for those of us who want
more from movies than the reassurance of remembered enjoyments recast
with new faces…The director of ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘The
Year of Living Dangerously’ has muffled the rage and darkness
of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. ‘Master
and Commander’ is a too-comfy classic." --Peter Rainer,
New York Magazine
"What makes ‘Master and Commander’ so bracing and
transporting -- what makes the movie feel unlike any adventure film
you've seen before -- is the precise detail and care with which
Weir places us aboard the HMS Surprise… one of the many facets
of Crowe's subtle, complex performance shows how the captain inspires
his men, like a Knute Rockne of the high seas, and convinces them
that the impossible really is within their grasp… It's a ride
few movies, if any, have ever been able to offer." --Rene Rodriguez,
Miami Herald
 "It
comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything
is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important…the
thing feels weirdly overstuffed, as stories keep stumbling into
and over one another or are buried beneath the arrival of other
stories…Crowe is outsize in the old movie-star fashion, a stern
face, a stout body, a formidable presence, but the movie idealizes
Jack Aubrey to a somewhat irritating degree…As for Bettany,
this was to be the picture that would make him a star, and it won't.
The movie is so pitched to Crowe that Bettany doesn't imprint with
any singularity… The young actor Max Pirkis [pictured above],
who plays Midshipman Lord Blakeney, is terrific in the part, easily
the master and commander of his elders." --Stephen Hunter,
The Washington Post
"Over the Oscar horizon comes ‘Master and Commander: The
Far Side of the World,’ an awesome, old-fashioned pirate epic…this
movie is as gorgeous and gripping as it is faithful to the spirit
of Patrick O'Brian's celebrated series of historical novels…No
video game can compare with the storms and travails that beset the
Surprise as she makes her way off the coast of Brazil and around
Cape Horn, complete with real storm footage from the actual route…‘Master
and Commander’ will take your breath away." --Jami Bernard,
The New York Daily News
"The film contains brilliantly crafted scenes and shots that
are as compelling as anything seen onscreen this year, but there
are also dull stretches in which the movie seems lightweight…for
all the blood in its battle scenes and the grim historical accuracy
of its depiction of antediluvian medical procedures, the story of
‘Master and Commander’ feels like something intended not
for adults but for children." -- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco
Chronicle
"… a thoughtful, rousing and beautifully crafted epic
starring a commanding Russell Crowe as the captain of an 1804 British
warship…Crowe exudes movie-star magnetism at the same time
as he once again completely disappears into his character…Crowe
has a superb foil in the bespectacled Bettany, another chameleon
of an actor, who may clinch an Oscar nomination for the scene where
a wounded Maturin is forced to operate to remove a bullet from his
own abdomen." --Lou Lumenick, The New York Post
 "The
movie works -- as an epic, as intimate drama, and as an intensely
focused portrayal of a small wooden city on the sea…Crowe buries
his charisma and gives us an intuitive jock who thinks not with
his brain but with his men and his ship…It's the opposite of
the sexy beast of ‘Gladiator,'’ yet you immediately grasp
why Jack's men follow him nearly to Antartica and back…The
film does lose steam after its climactic battle -- the dialogue
turns self-conscious, and Crowe and Bettany suddenly seem somehow
smaller, like an early-19th-century Kirk and Spock. This is not
a good thing." --Ty Burr, Boston Globe
"The national mood could hardly be more right for Peter Weir's
‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,' a rousing
and magnificently crafted 19th-century warship saga that handily
dispenses with pesky questions about ulterior motives, civil liberties,
and recalcitrant indigenous populations that bedevil our country's
present-day engagements…The shots might be cluttered with ropes
and pulleys and masts and mizzenmasts, but the storytelling is lean
and shapely…‘Master and Commander’ hooks you from
its nifty opening salvo to its nifty closing punch line." --David
Edelstein, Slate
"This is Mr. Weir's best movie in ages, conveying the subtle
sense of mystery that underlay ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘The
Year of Living Dangerously.’ I do have a nit to pick regarding
Crowe, who relies more on his winning smile than his emotional versatility
to bring Aubrey alive. In all, though, this is a rip-roaring adventure
combining edge-of-your-seat battle scenes with vivid historical
details and more fascinating characters than most action movies
dream of. Add heartfelt acting and Russell Boyd's atmospheric camera
work, and you have the adventure movie of the year." --David
Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor
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