Word: aubrey
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Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World has been advertised as a balls-out action movie; it seems like an unofficial sequel to Gladiator with cannonballs instead of lions. The truth is, although it stars Russell Crowe as a British sea captain named Lucky Jack Aubrey, it is as close to Gladiator as The Mask was to The Truman Show...
Setting sail in 1805, in the midst of the Napoleonic war, Aubrey is ordered to take his ship, the HMS Surprise, to the Pacific and prevent The Acheron, a French ship, from extending France’s dominion to the Americas...
...ordinarily go for the actual film, which is more of a rarity: although it has three action scenes, at the beginning, middle and end, most of the movie is focused on smaller, less dramatic moments. The heart of the movie is not the battles, but the relationship between Aubrey and Ship Surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany, Crowe’s imaginary roommate in A Beautiful Mind...
...this pitch-perfectly played character becomes harder not to appreciate. Far from being a simple audience surrogate, Maturin is just confused by the technical jargon. As far as I could tell from the exposition, Maturin had been drafted onto the Surprise and, though he has become good friends with Aubrey during his time aboard, he still is out of his element...
...MATURIN. Oh, dear. The film has him as nothing more than a doctor and naturalist who happens to be Aubrey's best friend. In fact, he was proudly Irish (with a touch of Catalan), a spy for the British, not handsome and utterly incapable of doing anything shipshape...