Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

There's much that is superb about Master and Commander - Russell Crowe's performance as early 19th-century Royal Navy captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey among them.

He is, as he was in Gladiator, both a force of nature and wholly believable as a man who is the demanding but compassionate ruler of his own little wooden and canvas world, the HMS Surprise.

Life and death aboard that ship comes depicted in meticulous, creaking, seasickness- and claustrophobia-inducing detail by celebrated Australian director Peter Weir.

The result is a rare film, one matching epic scale with period nautical exactitude and vivid characters.

It also matches thrilling gung-ho action, with plenty of naval warfare and the inevitable display of seamanship on storm-tossed high-seas, with a believable depiction of life below decks and meditation about the nature of leadership and heroism - its point of resonance for 21st-century audiences. You can expect it will come up for discussion in middle-management seminars for years to come.

However, it's not really much of a story. It might be based on the obsessively detailed 20-volume series of Aubrey novels of Patrick O'Brian, but it's a linear affair, largely isolated to the confines of the Surprise.

The plot, such as it is, could be an episode of Star Trek with ship surgeon and naturalist Maturin (Bettany) the Spock to Aubrey's Kirk as they pursue Klingons (an elusive French privateer Aucheron) to the far side of the galaxy (around Cape Horn) while stopping off at a planet of scientific significance (in this case the Galapagos Islands) and generally going boldly where no Royal Navy man has been before.

Except, of course, the likes of Captain Cook some years earlier. You do wonder if Antipodeans Crowe and Weir were inspired by the legend of Cook, as well as the Endeavour's scientist Joseph Banks, ingrained into us colonials as boys.

But it's the spectre of Horatio Lord Nelson that hangs heavy over this film, which is set a year before his death at the Battle of Trafalgar and seven years after Aubrey says he served under his command during the Battle of the Nile.

One of the Surprise's young officers, 12 year-old Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis) loses his right arm - as did Nelson - in one of the film's many wince-inducing shipboard medical procedures.

The original story was set some years later when the Surprise was chasing an American ship about the Atlantic - the script having switched foes in a diplomatic manoeuvre, to stop confusing the allegiances of stateside audiences.

But if the utterly uncomplicated war story leaves this lacking that one extra dimension to fully sustain its 140 minutes, it's still often thrilling and fascinating.

With Crowe's portrayal of a complicated, dutiful hero reminding he's a great actor on screen - who just happens to be an annoying celebrity when off it - this becomes a film that rises above being a grand piece of naval-gazing.

Cast: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany

Director: Peter Weir

Rating: M (medium-level violence)

Running time: 138 mins

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley from January 1