Fiat Lux

It's late and I'll pay for this when the alarm clock goes off oh so early tomorrow morning, but I saw "Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World" tonight & wanted to throw down a few lines while my impressions are still fresh.

As a longtime avid fan of the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin series, I had waited for the opening of the movie version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Happily, I was much more pleased than disappointed by the results. Given the limits of what you can cram into one movie, I think they did a fair job of bringing an O'Brien book to the screen. But my pleasure was not unalloyed.

Other, less exhausted reviewers of the movie will go into detail of the subplots cut, the bits freely borrowed from other O'Brien novels, and the somewhat contrived ending. I'll limit myself to these few observations:

1) I think they could have kept the original love triangle subplot with Midshipman Horner, the gunner, and his wife rather than making Horner out to be just another aging, inept midshipman who couldn't pass for lieutenant. I suppose it made the film too long to add it in.

2) I'm a fan of Billy Boyd, but I found him somewhat incongruous as Barrett Bonden. I'd always pictured Bonden to be older and not as good looking.

3) Russell Crowe did a good job as Aubrey. I would have liked to see Aubrey a little more human and less permanently enrobed with the godlike authority of a captain, but that's not what you get with Crowe, and all things considered it was an acceptable tradeoff. He certainly did a good job of the glee Jack felt when sailing Surprise into a storm or boarding a Frenchman's deck, for example. And I loved the 'lesser of two weevils' bit.

4) Maturin. As with Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany is a good actor, but my mental image of Stephen Maturin was not in line with him. Bettany is too tall and too good-looking to be the small, scrawny, bewigged Doctor. And in the final battle, despite the fact that O'Brien does take pains to demonstrate that Stephen is a good fighter, there's no way Maturin would have boarded the enemy. His place was in the cockpit with the wounded and he would not have left it.

4) Blakeney. I would have preferred meeting young Babbington.

Despite my quibbles, I do think "Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World" is a move well worth seeing and I suspect it will fight it out with "Lord Of The Rings" for a few Oscars this springtime.