Master and Commander: Far Side of the World

4/5 stars

The orders of the English ship, the Surprise, are to hunt down the Acheron, a French ship, and burn, sink or take it home as a prize. Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) takes his ship to the ends of the Earth, and beyond, to fulfill his orders. The Surprise finds itself rounding South America, and then trekking back north to the Galapagos Islands.

I was glad that we were able to see this movie on a big screen — it would have lost something on a TV screen. We toured the USS Constellation in the Baltimore Inner Harbor this past spring, and it felt very claustrophobic, even without a full crew — the movie captured this feeling of claustrophobia quite well. The opening scene shows the men in their hammocks below decks — they are packed in there! The movie did lose me when the doctor (Paul Bettany) preformed surgery on himself — until then I was fully taken in by the movie, it’s scenery, plot and characters.