Lacking Natural Simplicity

Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World. Inspired by the novels by Patrick O'Brian, directed by Peter Weir, screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee. This is a good movie, providing a vivid and realistic depiction of life on board a frigate in the British Royal Navy of the Napoleonic era, and that is its primary merit. Although it is not based on any one of the novels directly, drawing on events from several novels, the resulting story is reasonable, and reasonably focused. The movie does capture to some degree the relationship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, but it is less successful here, since most of the formative events in their friendship take place long before the movie starts, and would take too much time to explore in full.

In the end, I think Aubrey and Maturin would have been better served by a film of the the book Master and Commander.