>As a devoted fan of the late Patrick O'Brian -- Jane Austen at sea (and I
>mean the ambiguity) -- I regret to say that the one person who's got the
>movie right, from the reviews I've seen, is the Lost Leader ("Just for a
>handful of silver he left us..."), Christopher Hitchens, in his Slate
>review (and this after he wrote an obtuse review of O'Brian's roman-fleuve
>in the NYRB):
>
>"Unlike Forester, O'Brian set himself not just to show broadsides and
>cutlass work and flogging and the centrality of sea power, but to
>re-create all of the ambiguities and contradictions of England's long war
>against revolutionary and Napoleonic France ... The summa of O'Brian's
>genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship's gifted
>surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty,
>a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth -- and a revolutionary. He
>joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his
>hatred for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles of 1789 -- principles
>that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic
>adaptation of O'Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing
>this figure.
>
>
I have to agree with Hitchens here, but only provisionally. Maturin's
half the joy in the books, and we just didn't see _him_ in the movie. As
an adaptation of O'Brian, the loss of Maturin cripples the film.
But the movie is fine in and of itself, and it gives us O'Brian fans a chance to wallow in one of his work's greatest joys-- the work required to run a ship of the line. And I may be the only person I know to admit to liking Russell Crowe, in this role and others. So I enjoyed the movie as it was.
(I wonder how he'd do as Flashman? (See http://www.briansiano.com/flashman for my own website on those books.) )