Word: bligh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same goes for The Bounty. The traditional plot of the mutiny that occurred on board the H.M.S, Bounty some 300 years ago has always come from the well-known novel Mutiny on the Bounty--which has twice been enacted on film already. In both film versions, the tyrannical Captain Bligh provokes a rebellion aboard his ship, led by the romantic Fletcher Christian, s the ship is returning home after spending some months in Tahiti on a mission for King George...
...production staff of The Bounty took obvious pains at making sure that their movie would not merely be a remake of standard Mutiny on the Bounty fare. Using new historical sources for the true story behind the mutiny, the filmmakers tried to flesh out the relationship between Bligh and Christian and make it clear that their motivations and personalities are much more complex than the cardboard characters in the originals. The movie also focuses much more than the originals on the details of the Bounty's journey and stay in Tahiti. The cinematography spends an inordinate amount of time presenting...
ANTHONY HOPKINS, however, does succeed in making Captain Bligh into a complex figure, whose binding ambition to sail around the world and fierce love of order somehow is not strong enough to overpower his deep-seated insecurity and desire to be accepted by his men. By showing, with amazing intensity. Blight's torturous, sleepless nights while in Tahiti, Hopkins reveals his character's inner turmoil. Bligh realizes that by allowing his men to frolic with the native women he is losing his control on them, yet if he forces them to stay on board the ship, their anger will take...
...problem is not with the actors. Anthony Hopkins plays Bligh with neurotically coiled intensity, while in the only strong scene he has, Mel Gibson, as Mr. Christian, shows himself capable of expressing with anguished force the conflict between duty and decency that has been tearing at him. The trouble stems from the crude truncation of a script that began many years ago as blueprint for a two-part David Lean epic. Originally the idea must have been to free the story of its mythical and melodramatic encrustations and get at something like the historical truth. The finished film offers fragmentary...
...this psychological line is inconsistently and unpersuasively developed. As a half-revised character, Bligh is emotionally becalming to the audience; it is hard to know whether to root for or against him, for or against Christian, who is mostly seen hanging about, looking puzzled...