Yesterday went from Eva Green Withdrawal Day to Manly Men on Boats Day faster than you can say “300-Rise-of-an-Empire-Master-and-Commander-The-Far-Side-of-the-World-double-feature.” I’ll get into more detail about my thoughts on the former in a blog post, but catching up with M&C:TFSotW (God, even the acronym is unwieldy) has made it clear why the 2003 tale of seafaring derring-do maintains a healthy reputation among the seemingly few who actually remember it (a certain, more pirate-focused vehicle from Disney that released a few months before it sucked up most of the oxygen and attention of nautically-inclined audiences).
Macstander: Side World is a movie for dudes. That’s not to say women can’t or shouldn’t enjoy it, it’s just that like, say, The Shawshank Redemption, it’s a film of only men, living in world of only men. Instead of a prison, Master Mander is set on an English man-of-war pursuing the hated French at the dawn of the 19th century. With a crew of 119 men aged from pre-pubescence to retirement, led by Captain Jack “Lucky” Aubrey, the manliest man of them all (played by Russell Crowe, of course), the film constructs a makeshift and entirely masculine society bound by close-quarters, and confined there over long periods of time.
As a historical epic, it’s really engaging to watch, giving a time-traveler’s tour guide of naval technology, culture, and organization. More specifically though, Commander World is an extremely effective exercise in Bro-manticism: it’s got massive ship-to-ship combat and gunplay for the action-hounds; it’s got the wide-eyed wonder of exploration that any kid with a backyard has ever felt; it’s dramatically rich in themes and speeches about duty and brotherhood; and, most importantly, it’s got Crowe’s Aubrey, a character who’s all men to all men. He can be stoic and badass, or boorish and bro-y depending on the scene, a man who both inspires the younger men under his command, and is himself humbled by the greatest man he ever knew, Admiral Nelson. Whereas most big budget films try to cover four quadrants, director Peter Weird seems to have gone out of his way to make sure male viewers from any decade will have something or someone to latch onto here.
And it totally works. Gary Larson’s: The Far Side casts such a wide net of male-interests within its microcosmic narrative that you can’t help but get swept up in the excitement. My particular point of weakness was Paul Bettany as the crew’s doctor and aspiring naturalist, because, hey, one doesn’t spend four years getting a Biology degree because that think nature is boring. Bettany’s character is meant to provide an occasional critique of the brotherly love the film otherwise embraces wholeheartedly, and it’s necessary. Without, it’d be easy to write the film off as pure man-pandering. Even if it were though, it’d be damn hard-to-resist man-pandering.