I saw the movie last night. It is quite excellent. Very different kind of movie. Superb acting and direction. It really feels like you are there with the crew. Just very very well done.
Saw it last night. It is definately not a cheezy action movie. Very interesting stuff that shows how the sailors lived. It is not really fast-paced, but very good.
Masterbaiter Of The Ocean's plot is thinner than The Cat In the Hat. Every stereotype and cliche' is included, they 'batten down the hatches' and 'swab the decks'. I'm pretty sure they just used the same background soundtrack as Saving Private Ryan for their battle scene. If you get to spend that much money on a movie, that's about the minimum result you should get. I guess we're going to get a "realistic" treatment movie for every old genre now. Hollywood typically copycats every last dollar out of any idea that is successful before taking any creative chances. Of course this movie will vie against The Matrix for an academy award while a real ground breaking movie like Dirty Pretty Things will labor along in anonimity.
I didn't like it at all. Total waste of time IMHO. Boring, pointless, and so bare bones that when someone says something funny you laugh just to wake yourself.
I'm a huge fan of O'Brian, as you know, but I want to see the movie before I talk about why they did it this way. From what I gather, Maturin isn't given nearly the role in the movie that he has in the novels... where, depending on the book, he's often more of the focus than Aubrey. Maybe it has something to do with the age of Crowe. The first book begins with the two of them as young men and Crowe's 39 (although I think he could still play much younger, as he did at the beginning of "A Beautiful Mind"). They make the enemy ship French instead of American and move the time period to '05 instead of '12, so they apparently are doing some serious mucking around with the series. With 20 novels to choose from, why start with number 10? Anyway, I'm dying to see the flick. I'm going to do just that in a day or two, with any luck.
