I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. As usual, I guess an ideological reading of the various political positions tendered in the film is rather fruitless, since it's mostly reactionary, schoolboy stuff, and everybody knows it -- I actually had a hankering to watch a stodgy war film, and I'd been recommended Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels a while ago, during a discussion about all the boys'-own naval allusions in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The idea behind that conversation was that Star Trek was always better when it was militaristic, and that its liberalism actually worked against it; when the setup was so obviously naval, tacking on feelgood moralism just made it cringeworthy.
I'm not sure exactly what I think of how Master and Commander's intense homosociality was played, especially since it reprised a lot of Weir's well-worn and pukeworthy private-schoolboys-together tropology. But there were moments of real tenderness (the younger officers were all really, deliberately cute), and conversely, I think Weir evoked the stench of paranoid masculinity and sublimated energy in an enclosed space quite well. Myself, I was swooning over Paul Bettany, who plays the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin; as a skeptical, humanist foil for his captain, he's the ultimate template for Star Trek's Dr McCoy -- he actually blurts, "Me, I'm against authority!" at one point. Only, McCoy wasn't such a looker, or a dandy, and neither did he play string duets with Captain Kirk in the latter's quarters (ooh err!), at least in a non-slash, canonical universe.
As the film paints the rather pointless miseries of inter-imperialist slaughter with a somewhat sympathetic brush, so too does it extend this ambivalence to the study of nature, of which Maturin is such an enthusiast. The natural sciences of the Enlightenment were slipping into the worst kind of mechanistic domination, on all levels, but Weir somehow manages to conjure a luminosity around Maturin's fascination with beetles and birds. The ship's brief visit to the teeming Galapagos islands is breathtaking, and all the more compelling because Maturin's zealous collecting obviously foreshadows Darwin's visit in the Beagle. Thus, Maturin also offers a template for Spock, the Science Officer and object of desire who shares a certain intimacy with the Captain. (Substitute 3D chess for the string duets.)
So speaking earnestly, perhaps Master and Commander represents the "best" of what Star Trek was attempting: an ambivalent but still sympathetic military adventure, with a sense of wonder. But without the camp fun and the bumpy heads, that's a little too earnest for my liking. Ha!
On another note, Peter Weir's daughter Ingrid used to do some design stuff with me when we were at university together, so I was happy to note that she designed Master and Commander's main titles! And Iva Davies, erstwhile of '80s Australian electropoppers Icehouse, cowrote the score. To celebrate, here's their cutest song, "Hey Little Girl", from 1982's Primitive Man. Hey, it was Number 1 in Switzerland!
