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dragonlady7I just watched Master and Commander. I enjoyed it immensely.
I will here mention that I did not watch it out of being a fan of Russel Crowe, Billy Boyd, or any of the other actors. Nor did I watch it because of the directors. I watched it because I am a tremendous fan of Patrick O'Brien.
Who?
The guy who wrote the books.
They're wonderful books.
I think that now might be a good time to likewise confess that I have never seen Sharpe's Rifles despite respecting Sean Bean's work. I am a fan of those books as well, and didn't know they'd been filmed until fairly recently.
Those books are slightly less excellent than Patrick O'Brien's. They focus more monotonously on a single character who is always the good guy.
O'Brien's are a fascinating study of a pair of very opposite characters, the captain and the surgeon, and how they interact. The movie touched on that, but certainly could not capture the full extent of it.
In the books. "Lucky" Jack Aubrey is an oversized, somewhat overweight, blustering and beloved figure, even as a young man. He is florid and has poor fashion sense, and is prone to putting his foot squarely in his mouth. He is also, as mentioned in the movie, inordinately fond of bad puns. He is also a brilliant seaman, a great leader of men, and a tremendous fighter in battle, lacking in neither bravery nor skill. He is good at speaking to the men. But in more polite company, he has his foot constantly in his mouth, and there is not one member of the House of Lords that he hasn't personally offended. He is also a perfectly indifferent fiddle player.
Stephen Maturin, on the other hand, is a small and sickly-looking man, with ferocious political sentiments, dubious allegiances, and a heavy and very official involvement in spying for the British government. He is the children of Irish and Catalonian parents, fiercely separatist and anti-tyrannical in all things. He is a consummate and passionate naturalist, as well as being an almost unreasonably skilled surgeon. The part in the movie about him removing part of a man's skull to relieve a depressed cranial fracture is straight from the books, as is the entire crew gathering to watch and reverently place bets.
Stephen and Jack are alternately soulmates and fierce opponents. O'Brien must have written at least a dozen books about them, detailing Jack's multicolored career from his first post-captaincy to... I don't know, as I never finished the series. In some of the books, Stephen and Jack are mortal enemies and want to duel one another-- over politics, over a woman, over any number of things. They have nothing in common. Jack is the son of a peer in the House of Lords (an unpopular one, unfortunately); Stephen is the bastard son of politically marginalized people. Neither can possibly understand where the other is from.
But in the end, they simply enjoy each other's company so much that neither could say they had a stronger friend anywhere in the world, and when it comes down to it they save one another's life in a thousand different ways. And yet, it's never sappy.
The books are a challenging read, I must admit. The movie captured a bit of the spirit of the books, of the essence, but really, it was more of a music video version of them than anything else. They gave you almost nothing to go with about them, and simply presented them mid-dialogue. I cannot imagine what a total stranger to the series would make of it. They simply mentioned the Napoleonic Wars and in you went. Not even I understood the bit at the end about the Acheron's physician (Dave and I puzzled it out, but still.) Just when you become absorbed in the human drama of the books, it will descend into impenetrable technical descriptions of what they are doing to the boat. The only relief is that Stephen has no idea what is going on either. (The scene where he says dryly that the Surprise is a somewhat aged man-of-war and there's stunned silence was straight bookverse, as well. He was given to saying things like that, to using entirely the wrong technical term for a ship, to calling a rope a line, to calling a mast a pole, and so on, and there were often stunned silences in the officer's mess.)
But Maturin is not always present to have things explained to him, and it would be cumbersome anyway. So there are pages and pages of tackles and sheets and cracking on, and I found that I would simply skim until the next bit of dialogue.
My father, however, would go to the diagram at the front of the book and flip back and forth between the pages to figure out precisely how they were sailing the ship. He loved those parts.
My parents loved this movie, by the way.
These are the parents who never watch movies. While they were dating, it was a big event for them to go see Barry Lyndon. Yes, the Kubrick movie. Well, you see, it had historical re-enactors in it, and candlelight scenes (film technology, or more properly lens technology, had to be innovated to film those scenes), and wonderful period costumes. Yes, it was a bizarre and troubling movie, but they thought it was simply marvellous. Because it was historically accurate, or close enough thereto for re-enactors to understand.
Have I mentioned how they met? The Bicentennial re-enactments. Yes. 1976. Camp fires, muskets, and I have seen the bodice Mom was wearing and it all becomes clearer to me. So... Yes, I owe my life to American History. American military history.
So anyhow. I enjoyed the movie as a sort of visualization of an episode from one of the books, but that's as far as it went. It didn't really bring anything to life that I needed brought to life, or re-imagine something that helped me see the original in a more illuminated way (like Lord of the Rings, the movies of which did almost inexcusable things at times but served their purpose to me of deepening my passion for the books and showing me things from them that I had not previously seen). No, the movie was just an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, explaining what was going on to Dave so that he could follow along. ("The other ship is bigger than them, has longer-range guns than them, and is in a better position relative to the wind than they are, so they're screwed." "Ah." "Oh, Aubrey just explained that. I should've just waited."
"A privateer is a ship given a sort of contract by the government that lets them take as prizes any ship flying the colors of an enemy nation. There's a lot of money in it. So they're sort of like pirates, but government-sanctioned." "Ah." "Oh, the inexplicable urchin just had that explained to him. I should've just waited."
"Oh check it out, this is the weevils scene." "... That was awful." "Squee! Straight out of the books!"
Mom gave Dad the Horatio Hornblower series as well, for his birthday I think. They've whiled away many enjoyable hours watching it. It's not quite so faithful, but they did have a great deal of fun with it. And Mom thinks Ioan whatsname is hot. Dad declined to offer a judgement.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-03 06:14 am (UTC)And I LOVED that movie. Although - yes, it had a couple of slowpoints. I don't care. I really ENJOYED it.
M&C
Date: 2004-09-03 05:12 pm (UTC)But...the entire movie gave me a feeling that there was some huge body of work that I needed to read to pick up on exactly what was going on. (Which there is.) Especially the relationship betweem the captain and surgeon, it was too in-depth to be explained by the brief mention of their heritage.
Maybe coulda been a great miniseries?
darius
Re: M&C
Date: 2004-09-03 06:03 pm (UTC)Except I don't know that people like Russell Crowe and that special effects crew would do a miniseries. Y'know?
I was wondering what it would be like for someone who hadn't read the books. I couldn't really ask Dave because I'd provided him a running commentary throughout, so he knew what was going on. Also, Dad had described the movie to me in depth in Dave's presence. So the weevil thing? Saw it coming a mile off.
Anyhow. Yes... it was a sort of alternate approach to a massive body of written work, different from LoTR's approach-- instead of Jackson's take, which was to make a massive movie epic that ostensibly gave you everything you needed to know, this approach instead gave you just a small section of it, so you could either infer the rest or view it as simply an adventure movie.
They gave you tiny snippets to work out details-- Aubrey telling Maturin he sounded like an Irishman and Maturin answering that he was one was all the background you got on either of them. Maturin's brief rant about the inherent tyranny of the Service, which did rely on press gangs and forced labor to fill out its crews, and Aubrey's response that he found it too depressing when Maturin talked about it-- that was all you got about their widely varying sociopolitical stances. (They never did mention that Aubrey had spent a brief stint as a foremast jack himself due to misbehavior as a midshipman under a stern captain, which would give more insight into Aubrey's even-handed, familiar, and strict treatment of his seamen.)
They didn't even take the time to mention that Maturin himself was a spy for the British government, and that was why such a skilled surgeon and consummate landlubber would be on a sailing ship in the first place. In several of the books, Maturin's mission was more important than the stated one of the ship. Which made for an even more interesting dynamic, as the very plain-speaking and honest Jack had to come up with a reason for his crew (including his highly intelligent and perceptive lieutenant, Tom Pullings, who was excellent and barely mentioned in the movie) why they were not pursuing their stated objective.
Crowe was a fascinating take on Aubrey-- I had always envisioned someone larger (in the books he is always cracking his head on doorways), someone a little more awkward (his faux pas were legendary in high society), someone a little sillier, to be more of a contrast to his tremendous command presence and battle valor. Crowe was actually shorter than Maturin's actor (name escapes me), which changed things a bit. But he does have an excellent presence, and he did the terrible pun quite well.
I have read complaints by non-readers that the movie was nearly unfathomable. But I would be helpless to say what more could have been included without making the movie one long giant info-dump.
Hornblower, similar in genre, was great as a miniseries. It's perfectly possible that M&C would have done well in that format as well. I am not quite sure what they were aiming to do with the movie. I found it enjoyable and book-faithful, but on its own? It's just so short and quick. But I think it would have been less good as a movie had they tried to start at the beginning.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-03 06:04 pm (UTC)Had you read the books? Did it make any sense to you without them?
Re: M&C
Date: 2004-09-03 07:28 pm (UTC)The producers probably did the best they could, trying to translate that much subject material into a single 2 hr flick. But some stories, while very filmable in the graphic sense, might not be appropriate movie fodder.
darius