I recommend this to all guys out there as a girlfriend character-indicator thing. If she says she'd rather not see this film, or if she sees it and goes "naah...not for me," dump her. Really. The same way you should dump any girl who doesn't like to go camping because she's afraid of bugs or something.

Is it sexy enough to sell tickets? Well, it doesn't have Orlando Bloom or any of those other cute guys in a second-banana role, but it delivers an extremely charismatic, wonderfully commanding lead performance by Russell Crowe. He's never been quite this dashing or charming in a purely alpha sense, and that should count for something.

Is it emotional? Perhaps not conventionally, but if taking a sailboat out on a big body of water (which I used to do as a teenager on the Long Island Sound) has ever made your heart pump or brought tears to your eyes, you'll find it stirring and then some.

MASTER AND COMMANDER is from the great Australian director Peter Weir. It's clearly his best film since WITNESS, and apparently his most physically ambitious ever. Of all Weir's first-rate films (and he really killed from PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK in '75 until his last good one, DEAD POET'S SOCIETY, in '89), it probably most resembles GALLIPOLI in terms of the male camaraderie thing and the anti-war leanings.

Just as Weir's THE LAST WAVE (1979) was called a thinking man's disaster film, MASTER AND COMMANDER is a thinking man's adventure epic -- an episodic, exploratory, alive-on-the-planet-earth journey that doesn't feel tricked up or stagey or conventionally Hollywood in any pronounced way.

Don't expect any resemblance to the comic shenanigans and smirky attitudes shovelled by Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinsky and Johnny Depp in last summer's successful but deeply boring PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN.

This $130 million adventure flick feels like real life, real organic history, the real thing. It's a total immersion into the challenge of manning a tall British warship and not getting blown apart by French cannons about 200 years ago.

COMMANDER is the first cinematic spawn of the close-to-legendary Patrick O'Brian novels (20 in all) about the enduring friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, and the seafarin' adventures they share aboard the H.M.S. Surprise.

Since 1989, when the Aubrey-Maturin novels began to be published by W.W. Norton, the books have sold more than 2 million copies. In O'Brian's NEW YORK TIMES obituary (he died three years ago), it was written that the novels had inspired comparisons "to Melville and Conrad and even to Proust." (And for what it's worth, 50% off their readers have been women, according to Norton's Starling Lawrence, as reported by the LOS ANGELES TIMES' John Balzar.)

To its immense credit, MASTER AND COMMANDER shuns the usual formulaic programming of big-budget adventure films, and for this alone I was on my knees minutes after it started. If movies that create the illusion of actually being in an exotic space mean anything to you, you'll want to take this trip.

By some people's standards, the story may perhaps be a little too simple and pared down. The script by Weir and John Collee is set almost entirely aboard the Surprise in 1805, when the British were fighting Napoleon and oceans were the new battlefields. It begins off the east coast of Brazil, takes us around the horn, visits the Galapagos Islands (which are somewhere to the west of Chile or Ecuador...I forget which), and ends in military triumph.

What happens doesn't constitute a "story" as much as a chapter-by-chapter adventure driven by an order from the British high command: "intercept French privateer Acheron...you will sink, burn or take her as a prize."

There are no snidely perverse villains you'll want to see killed, and there's no love story in the captain's cabin with some hotsy-totsy Maureen O'Hara type. There's no obsessive mission on the captain's part a la MOBY DICK or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP, no bitter conflict between the captain and the first mate, no cruelty toward the crew and no mutiny...none of that.

It's more of an evolving outdoor-challenge thing, and at the same time an internal journey.

Men against the sea, against the enemy's cannons, against Cape Horn. Dealing with battle, death, hardships, wounds, claustrophobia, weak midshipmen, amputations. Along with fiddles and bass violas played in the captain's cabin and the constantly delayed study of curious new life forms on the Galapagos Islands.

The theme is about how life's purportedly necessary tasks (which in the film are tied to duty, war, and loyalty to country) are forever intruding upon the pursuit of the enlightening, soul-affecting things.

It made me think of an old David Mamet line that goes, "I went to sleep dreaming life was beauty -- I woke up knowing life is duty."

What comes through in the end is a kind of naturalist/humanist message about how nature's serenity is always trying to get through to us, and how we rarely pay attention.

From a guy perspective, MASTER AND COMMANDER felt to me like a trip into a magnificent Whole Earth Catalogue of tools and implements for life in the early 1800s. Wait until you see all the knives, axes, chisels, tweezers and whatnot. Awesome stuff! William Sandell, the film's production designer, is a sure bet for an Oscar nomination.

As Maturin, the ship's surgeon and Aubrey's best bro, Paul Bettany conveys the right things -- a strong ethical core, basic decency, thoughtfulness -- in a quietly moving way. The other standout is Max Pirkis, a 13 or 14 year-old British actor who plays Lord Blakeney, a midshipman who shows exceptional courage and character as the story unfolds.

COMMANDER also has the best CGI depiction of heavy weather (i.e., the most invisible and naturalistic) I've ever seen. It's got a typhoon/storm sequence that's flat-out magnificent, and which makes the mountainous seas in Wolfgang Petersen's THE PERFECT STORM look distinctly hard-drivey.

And yet despite all this (or in part because of its non-traditional approach), there are commercial warning signs for this film.

A marketing friend who saw it with me said he liked MASTER AND COMMANDER, but added "it's a tough sell." He also said Fox executives are "scared" about its chances at the box-office. Two journalists at the junket last weekend said they couldn't figure out who the audience is. A guy told me last weekend that someone he knows in the Hollywood Foreign Press had laughed at it, or at what they felt it amounted to.

I'll admit that MASTER AND COMMANDER may be looking at a slight problem with that portion of the audience that likes the usual-usual. Let's hope all these naysayers are wrong. I love this movie, and I hope everyone reading this column will give it a shot.

The only other sticky wicket I can think of is that 13-syllable title. We may as well just lop off THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD right now and throw it to the sharks. It sure as hell won't fit on any theatre marquee that uses hand-mounted plastic letters.

In a Pig's Eye

Even without MASTER AND COMMANDER to compare it to, Lewis Milestone's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1962), another big-canvas seagoing spectacle, is looking more and more stodgy and conventional. That cornball Tahitian music...yeesh. Trevor Howard and Richard Harris turn in feisty, first-rate performances, but Marlon Brando's foppy Fletcher Christian is more and more of a hoot as time passes. That mincing British accent is an earsore.

On the other hand it's 75% of a fairly lively film (it collapses after the mutiny). Bronislau Kaper's score still puts the hook in from time to time, and Robert Surtees' photography (captured in Super Panavision 70) us still very pretty to look at. And there are probably enough of us in DVD Land who are big-enough fools for big-format early '60s releases to constitute a modest-sized audience for a MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY DVD.

If Warner Home Video had any passion for this title (which I doubt), they'd be considering giving the original 70mm elements a high-definition digital remastering and putting out a BOUNTY disc around the same time that a DVD of Weir's film arrives (probably in the spring or early summer of '04) as a piggyback thing.

I'm mentioning this only because Milestone's depiction of the Bounty trying to make its way around Cape Horn is still fairly exciting, even compared to Weir's version of the same thing in MASTER AND COMMANDER. Even though it was shot on a sound stage intercut with a model in a water tank, it's probably the single most effective sequence in the whole film. Kaper's music really ties the whole thing together.

Smell That Sea Air!

I was on such a men-at-sea kick last weekend that I figured this would be a perfect time to read a recent draft of Wes Anderson's latest film, THE LIFE AQUATIC, which has been shooting in Italy since early September.

The star is Bill Murray in the title role of undersea explorer and documentarian Steve Zissou, a doobie-toking Jacques Costeau-type guy with major personality problems.

The costars are Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Stormare, Bud Cort and Michael Gambon. Anderson, Scott Rudin and Barry Mendel are producing. Disney will be distributing sometime in late '04.

I was chuckling all through the 140 pages, partly at the bone-dry humor and partly from the pleasure that comes from visiting a place you've been to and enjoyed before. Andersonville is like Greece or Bangkok or Savannah, Georgia. It's a very real place with its own characters, language and culture, and its own gently skewed state of mind.

The big differences this time around, as opposed to the Andersonville dramatized by BOTTLE ROCKET, RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, are (a) action, (b) death and (c) lots and lots of sea water. A diver gets chewed into mulch by a huge spotted shark, another guy gets kidnapped, some other guys get shot and a major character dies.

In a word, adventure....with the usual deadpan, ultra-dry humor. Wes Anderson's BEAT THE DEVIL?

It's not quite a Jerry Bruckheimer thing, but does seem as if something or somebody got to Wes and said, "Okay, dude...let's get a little more physical and outdoorsy this time. Maybe throw in a little JAWS or something."

Once again Anderson has used his RUSHMORE and TENENBAUMS relationship dynamic of an immature, emotionally screwed-up father figure (Murray in RUSHMORE, Gene Hackman in TENENBAUMS, and Murray again in AQUATIC) both nurturing and messing with the heads of either surrogate or actual sons (Jason Schwartzman in RUSHMORE, Luke Wilson and Ben Stiller in TENENBAUMS, Owen Wilson in AQUATIC).

And once again, we're dealing with an extended family - a professional one this time, aboard a high-tech yacht -- with the usual Anderson quirks, hang-ups, jealousy issues, etc.

The descriptive passages pay a lot more attention to what people are wearing in each scene than Wes did in previous scripts. In just about every descriptive graph, there's a line that reads like this: "Zissou wears his Team Zissou shirt and matching aquamarine pants with navy blue stripes down the sides." Previous Wes scripts didn't exhibit this fetish. Wes is said to be something of an exacting clothes horse in real life, and now this seems to be bleeding into his work.

The script, dated 4.30.03 and written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, is a smart, smooth read. (Anderson co-wrote all his previous scripts with Owen Wilson.) I tore through it on my couch in just under an hour.

Steve Zissou (Murray) is this glib egoistic prick of an oceanographer who's famous for making documentaries called "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." Except his docs have been going downhill in quality, and he's seen as a kind of has-been by some. Steve has a well-funded rival named Alistair Hennessey (Gambon...I think) who was once the lover of Zissou's wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), an author of several books about marine life whom everyone describes as the real brains of the operation.

Zissou's latest doc is premiering as the script begins. The film is seen as some kind of disaster because Zissou failed to shoot the biggest dramatic highlight -- the death of his partner, Esteban, who was eaten by a huge monster shark. Zissou declares to the audience his intention to go after the shark and kill it solely for revenge. But his funding is low and he eventually finds himself in dire financial straits.

Enter Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who may just be Zissou's long-lost son. Ned has inherited a few hundred thou recently, and so he volunteers to fund this new Zissou expedition as a way of bonding with his presumed dad. This gesture triggers a certain subdued jealousy on the part of Klaus (Dafoe), one of Zissou's longtime crew members and a quasi-son figure also.

The usual eccentric characters and oddball developments abound. Eleanor decides she's through with Zissou's bullshit and decides to split early on. An aspect of Ned's financing deal means that a stooge for a bond company stooge named Bill (Goldblum) will tag along on the expedition to find the killer shark. There's also a pregnant reporter named Jane (Blanchett) who arrives to do a story on Zissou's operation, and is soon "involved" with both Ned and Steve.

And that's just the set-up. It goes all over the place from this point forward.

I can't wait to see how Anderson stages his action scenes. Will he decide to shoot them with a static camera, trying to stay with his usual shooting style and play against the energy...or will he try a hand-held, fast-cut approach?

You can't tell with scripts, but on the page THE LIFE AQUATIC struck me as the funniest thing Anderson's ever written. It's definitely going to be cool. Now that I'm on record as liking the script, my next move will be to catch the finished celluloid version at a New York Film Festival press screening and trash it. Just kidding, Wes!

Grabber

Excellent work on the part of Warner Bros. marketing on this just-released poster for Wolfgang Petersen's TROY (5.21.04), regardless whether it was done in-house or by an outside boutique.

The ideas conveyed straight off are (a) star Brad Pitt's sexiness (i.e., the pic's main selling point) in his lead role as Achilles, and (b) that Petersen won't be delivering any kind of pseudo-stodgy history-book movie. Whatever the film is and however it finally plays, the ad boys are telling us this ancient tale is going to be rendered with a great deal of sex, style and panache. Check.

I don't know why I can't seem to push my way through the copy of the TROY script I have. I've tried a couple of times and no go. I'll give it another shot soon.