![]() But with one shot, Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd cut past the clichés to explain why ships (and, by extension, O'Brian's novels) touch so many of us as they do: Suspended between the storybook and the prosaic, they're the precise intersection of visual poetry and damn hard work. We all know that ships represent the romance and allure of the sea. "Master and Commander" is drawn largely from the 10th novel of the late Patrick O'Brian's regal 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series (named after its two central characters, close friends who are nearly polar opposites), a body of work that has attracted a loyal cult of readers for more than three decades.īut I don't think you need to have read O'Brian to understand the visual shorthand of that shot of the Surprise, its sails catching the wind like a gift, its masts standing taller and prouder than anything built by man has a right to. I suspect most viewers will know if Peter Weir's magnificent and heartfelt "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" is their kind of movie within the first 10 minutes, when they get that first long-shot glimpse of HMS Surprise, the vessel on (and around) which nearly all the movie's action takes place. Vain if not exactly haughty, they love the camera - but not nearly as much as the camera adores them. Like pianos, guitars and violins, they're built of stuff that used to be alive, and it sometimes seems as if, deep down, their once-spongy cells retain a sense memory of what that was like. ![]() ![]() They respond to the air around them and the water below with flirtatiousness, authority and, when it's called for, shuddering humility. Their patrician bone structure looks grand from any angle, and the whiteness of their sails generously and graciously reflects back more light than it absorbs.
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