British naval dominance during the age of sail

APRIL 1805

NAPOLEON IS MASTER OF EUROPE.

ONLY THE BRITISH FLEET STANDS BEFORE HIM.

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS.

1) God damn that movie is so good.

2) I think part of why it stands out so much is that there are incredibly few excellently-made age of sail war films. A few of the black & white and early color era ones are pretty good (The Sea Hawk and such) but those are pretty different in tone. Master and Commander is very nearly unique. You have to switch over to sci fi (Star Trek, maybe Forbidden Planet) to scratch a similar itch. If you want specifically age of sail, with that structure and tone (war, edge-of-civilization exploration with a ship), your options are very limited.

3) I have discovered only very-belatedly that Peter Weir is one of my favorite directors. I had no idea for the longest time that the same guy did The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander, The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, Witness, and The Truman Show. Dude just knocked out one quietly-great movie after another, across multiple genres. I've gone back and picked up some others (Gallipoli, The Cars that Ate Paris) and have yet to be disappointed. The remainder of his all-too-short catalogue is high up my to-watch list. I've seen zero duds from him so far.

Master and Commander[1], I love that film and the series of books.

A detail I loved from both is that the French are treated with respect as formidable adversaries.

There's no love lost in battle but when either side are captured they generally treat each other well[2].

The other detail is the amount that the protagonists get permanently injured; burned, amputated, broken or just lost overboard. That happened, a lot and people just got on with it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Commander

2. Maturin does get tortured in one of the books but we'll gloss over that.

It's funny now how the opening of a movie can be read as a prompt to an LLM. Given the heavy copyright infringement, it would not be surprising to get the actual plot line to this specific movie as a response as seen in previous examples posted here before.

Highly highly recommend Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels on which the movie is based. They are amazing: full of deeply-researched detail about life in the British navy during the napoleonic wars, with wonderful characters, and thrilling page-turners as well. Best historical novels ever written.

Assemble the dads for the dad film!

(Incredible movie and very enjoyable novels, recommend Master and Commander and Aubrey Maturin to all HN users)

If you like the exploration type stuff, maybe try the Van Rijn series. It’s loosely based on Dutch merchants but in a sci fi setting. Some interesting discussion of capitalism, trade and exploitation too. It is also very much of its time.

+1

And the Simon Vance recordings are delightful.

Don't forget Picnic at Hanging Rock!

I really love Peter Weir -- I don't think all of his movies are amazing, but many of them are, and they're all really ambitious and unique. He never rests on his laurels. (Reminds me in that respect of George Miller, director of Babe and Mad Max)

Strongly seconded. For me, they were better than the Hornblower novels (which are excellent in their own right).

That one and The Last Wave are the ones from his remaining ~7 movies I've not seen, that I fully expect to be good. I know less of the reputation of the other five, but even if all of them are bad that'll leave him with an excellent batting average.

[EDIT] To expand on my late-discovered love of the guy's work, the key figures in my slowly drifting toward being a bit of an actual film fan were all people I knew by name: Spielberg (Empire of the Sun, plus all his usual biggies), Don Bluth (Learning so young that a movie can hurt... and that can be a really good thing!), and George Lucas (first by hooking me on Star Wars, which got me into making-ofs and the craft of film-making and editing, the idea of the pastiche film which sent me chasing down influences, and then with the prequels with wanting, owing to my prior high levels of engagement with the franchise, to dig deeper into "... but why, exactly, are they so bad?" which was its own kind of education); but then, some time in the back half of my 30s, I discovered that a bunch of other films that'd been key on that journey were all by this one other dude whose name had previously failed to register. He was this fourth major figure in the early and middle parts of this journey, for me, and I didn't even know it!

Well yes, but the torture is outsourced to a villainous Spainiard!

> Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey–Maturin_series

I have always desperately wanted a Star Wars movie that is essentially nothing more than Master and Commander.

No magical beings, no one-in-a-trillion mega-celebrities. Just professionals doing their jobs within the Navy and the adventures they had as mortal, skilled, men.

What are the TIE Pilots talking about off-shift, how does the Captain feel about the new mission priorities?

Andor is closest we've had to seeing this POV.

Yeah, kind of what Lower Decks (the show, and for that matter also the episode "Lower Decks") is to Star Trek, but not comedy. Andor is indeed the closest I know of to that, though you see little touches of similar things in some episodes of The Mandalorian and the Clone Wars cartoon (though of course that one's also full of the "magical beings")

Maturin gets tortured because he is involved in “ungentlemanly or dishonorable” forms of warfare (phrased to avoid revealing a plotline).

The Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books are good as well, if you'd like to see Napoleon's armies defeated on land instead of sea.

After seeing the movie I devoured the entire series. Great stuff.

And Allan Mallinson's series about Matthew Hervey adds another branch of the military. Post-napoleonic, but a fascinating trip through colonialism.

While the torture takes place in Spanish held Port Mahon in Mallorca, the torturers are unarguably French (Colonel Auger, Captain Dutourd, unnamed other Frenchmen).

> Just professionals doing their jobs

This is one of the reasons I love Rogue One. There is a desperation that permeates the film that culminates into the titanic final scene

If Peter Jackson had followed through with Temeraire I think it’d be right up your alley.

Don’t forget the Hornblower book (and tv movie) series by C. S. Forester.

> Given the heavy copyright infringement,

Hollywood: "We successfully created a societal archetype! Yay!" Also Hollywood: "Unqualified societal idiom now refers to our archetype! Dreadful infringement machine!"

I feel like there have been rumblings of an honor Harrington by David Weber movie for decades at this point. It it may just not happen.

Ah my memory fails me. Thanks!