British naval dominance during the age of sail

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.

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.

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)

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!

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")

> 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.

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.