Review: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the WorldPeter Weir's career has been one of tremendous successes and moderate failures. His best films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Truman Show, Fearless) show a filmmaker with formidable technical skills and a passion for stories about the individual. His worst films (Dead Poets Society, Green Card) lack the formal intelligence he's capable of and fail to capture his best sensibilities. His latest film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, falls somewhere in the middle. Though technically marvelous, Master and Commander suffers from too much attention detail, with too little attention to narrative tension and cinematic grammar. Weir's film manages to be utterly convincing from an historical standpoint, but completely unengaging from a filmgoing perspective. The story of a British Captain (Russell Crowe) who hunts a phantom ship across the ocean against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, Master and Commander lives in a world seldom seen. Indeed, its most innovative conceit is dedicating itself to the complete mastery of historical relevance. I have no idea if this is what life on a ship was truly like at that time, but it feels authentic. Unfortunately, there's little else to feel here. The film never seems to be up to anything but a series of set pieces designed to culminate in a supreme battle. It doesn't help that the ship battles in Pirates of the Caribbean were far more engaging and thrilling than they are here. While Weir has succeeded in getting the details right, he seems to have abandoned his devotion to intimate character development. Master and Commander is a bit like the ship under Crowe's command: big and reliable, but not sturdy enough to succeed without a little camouflage. |