The first screen incarnation of Lucky Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's loved and admired series of historical adventure novels, captain of the British man-of-war, the HMS Surprise. This is preeminently a boys' story, and as pure and innocent a specimen as you are apt to find anymore, uncorrupted by concerns with democracy or demographics. (The closest you could find to it in the oeuvre of its director, Peter Weir, is the curdled Conradism of The Mosquito Coast.) There is an actual boy on view, a cherubic curly-topped towhead, but of course boys of all ages want to choose their role models and hero figures from among grown men (as the towhead, for example, has chosen Lord Nelson). Girls have no place here at all. There is but one, brief, silent, almost spectral appearance by a female, a copper-skinned native on whom Lucky Jack allows his gaze to linger -- gateway to another world -- before he gets back to business. That business would encompass, among other things, the pursuit of a bigger and faster French privateer, the amputation, the flogging, the flagons of rum, the parrot on the shoulder, the typhoon, the man overboard, the seamen's superstitions (is there a "Jonah" among the crew? is the enemy a "phantom"?), the military stratagems (a makeshift raft, festooned with lanterns, cut adrift as a decoy to throw off the trailing French ship in the dark), the naturalist interlude on the Galápagos (the flightless bird, the amphibian iguana), the Churchillian if not Shakespearean address to the troops on the eve of battle ("Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England"), and most importantly, at the core of it all, the masculine camaraderie, especially that between the Captain and the ship's surgeon, Dr. Stephen Maturin, whose harmonious friendship, as well as harmonious violin-and-cello duets, sometimes must give way to the traditional testiness between the soldier and the scientist, the man of action and the man of intellect. Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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