Critics
Some info about our #100,
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World...
It currently has a 85% Certified Fresh Tomatometer score among critics, if you're the kind of guy that checks that. Remember that the Tomatometer is not a direct measure of quality, but rather a metric of how many critics gave it a positive review, which could've ranged from "Wow! It was magnificent! Best of the year!" to merely "twas Ok".
Meanwhile, the film has a
7.4/10 score on IMDb (with 213,000 votes).
Anyway, Roger Ebert gave it ★★★★ and called it:
"Grand and glorious, and touching in its attention to its characters. Like the work of David Lean, it achieves the epic without losing sight of the human, and to see it is to be reminded of the way great action movies can rouse and exhilarate us, can affirm life instead of simply dramatizing its destruction."
On the other hand, Kam Williams of Town Topics said:
"While Master and Commander recaptures the bygone days of the ultimate in intimate male-bonding opportunities, it fails to develop any meaningful relationships among its characters. Thus, this is a mindless war movie with dialogue saturated with words such as sextant, leftenant and bosun's mate, and punctuated with Anglophilic appeals like 'For England! For home and the prize!' and 'This ship is England!'."
As for our MoFo reviewers, @
Citizen Rules said:
"What a great film!... It's the characters and how they interact and show us life abroad ship that makes this film very special. Yes it does have some thrilling moments, many in fact. Yes there's plenty of action and good old ship broadsides with roaring canon blast and shards of ship boards a-flying. But this film has something more, heart and that makes it much better than the average sailing ship movie."
While @
Hondo333 said:
"I have walked out of the cinema disappointed... Not that I had expected a lot from Master and Commander, but I had at least expected a decent film, which was not delivered... I think that there was a (failed) attempt to transfer what was happening on the screen to affect the viewer."
Remember that although I might or might not share this thoughts for some of the films, you can always click the poster on each entry, which will take you to each film's special page within MoFo, with lots of neat information about it, and links to the reviews of fellow MoFo's.