Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields. And a moderate box office success from 2003 has become an unlikely streaming favorite, a poster child for the kind of movies Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, and a beacon of positive masculinity.

That would be Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, director Peter Weir’s adaptation of the historical seafaring novels by writer Patrick O’Brian. Set inside the hermetically sealed world of the HMS Surprise, an early 19th-century British Royal Navy frigate, the movie stars Russell Crowe—fresh off Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind—as Jack Aubrey, the bold, daring, and conspicuously ponytailed captain. Paul Bettany plays Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, an erudite naturalist, and Captain Aubrey’s BFF.

If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie. Though Master and Commander is ostensibly about the Surprise sailing to intercept a French enemy warship, the battle scenes, exhilarating as they may be, are few and far in between. The bulk of the film—and the heart of its charm—is instead a meticulous rendering of daily life at sea: the monotony of hard labor, the palpable threat of scurvy, the dirty-faced sailors who sleep in close quarters and grin through yellowed teeth. (You know it smells crazy in there.) Even better? All the screen time devoted to close conversations between Aubrey and Maturin, and their two-dude violin and cello jam sessions. You come away with a sense of satisfaction at their accomplishments and camaraderie, and just a bit of longing over a bygone way of life.

But that low-key intimacy was confounding to audiences expecting the next Gladiator, and the film’s enduring popularity was not obvious when it was first released. Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind each won Best Picture, and Crowe nabbed a Best Actor Oscar for the former. Though Master and Commander was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the show. Master and Commander ended up as the 33rd highest-grossing movie of 2003, three spots behind Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde.

Twenty years after it was released in theaters, Master and Commander has found a new life on the internet, simultaneously the subject of memes and sincerely beloved by a certain type of guy (gender neutral). So why does the movie, which is streaming on HBO Max, suddenly have such a grip on the public imagination? One might initially think that it’s a matter of ironic distance—after all, this is a movie about the stodgy British navy, where every single character is a man. “The hot new bachelor party activity is napoleonic era naval gunnery exercises. The boys hooting and hollering as they drink grog firing three broadsides in two minutes,” reads one tweet. Another imagines a scenario in which several more Master and Commander films are announced to the world, Marvel and DC style.

It’s also just fun to argue about online. Even Russell Crowe got into the mix, responding to someone who called the film boring. But while posting about Master and Commander is popular with an irony-adjacent crowd, the love for it is all sincere. Many of the film’s most vocal fans are in their thirties. If they originally saw it in their tween or teen years, their relationship with the movie only deepened as they grew older. //

Any nostalgia stirred up by Master and Commander is also nostalgia for a different era of Hollywood. This sort of richly detailed, big-budget historical epic rarely gets a chance in today’s movie landscape. And even if the action isn’t the point, the battles absolutely kick ass, using practical effects that would probably be weightless CGI these days. (They bought a ship in Rhode Island and sailed it through the Panama Canal and a hurricane to a six-acre filming tank in Mexico!)

Nando Vila, the head of studio at Exile Content Studio, told me, “I think why a lot of guys are liking it now is because Aubrey is so charming and swashbuckling and swaggery. You believe that all those sailors are into Lucky Jack and they'll follow him to the far side of the world. You don't see that kind of brawny, ‘We're just going to go to the far side of the world. Who's with me?’—that’s not a movie that gets made anymore.”

Tom Rothman, the current chairman of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, was the chairman and CEO at Fox when Master and Commander was released. The film was his personal project: a longtime fan of the books, he had been attempting the project for 15 years. “I had to become the chairman of a major motion picture studio before I could get it made,” he told me.

“Why the books, I believe, endure is because they combine the epic and the intimate. They have epic action and daring in them,” Rothman said. “And I'm like any guy. I love that shit. ‘Oh man, they're going to take that ship’ and all that stuff. That's great. Right? But they're also very intimate and personal. They combine the epic and the intimate, and that's what great historical movies do.”

And though Master and Commander may be a film set in 1805 and made in 2003, its themes are eternal.

“It's about how men (and boys) behaved in that time and circumstance,” director Peter Weir told me in an email. “How they understood concepts like 'duty' and 'courage'. Perhaps that has some relevance today. Times change, and with them fashions, but some things remain imperishable. This film touches on those imperishables.”

Salon published an essay that compared the MAGA movement to ISIS. Their reasoning: men are drawn to both groups because of...toxic masculinity. The essay compared “so-called incels who commit mass shootings” to “Trump fans who attack government buildings” and “terrorists imbibing ISIS propaganda." The comparison went on to conclude that "toxic masculinity" was responsible for the radicalization of members of both groups. By the way, gold star for the mental gymnastics required to get that January 6 reference in there. //

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Masculinity isn’t toxic. The absence thereof is toxic.
Weak men are abusive and spiteful.
Strong men are protective and loving.
Make masculinity great again.
2:51 PM · Jan 3, 2025

Even when not in situations where violence is needed, men are excellent leaders and decision makers. They're solution-oriented and effective at implementing these solutions, even in the midst of pushback.

So the key to control is to kick that will to fight out of men, and to do that, you have to have a multi-front assault on masculinity and the inherent drives of men. It's something that has to be done over a long period of time, and if you look at our current situation in terms of the state of masculinity, you'll see this very plan has been in motion for a while. //

Our society, including our schools, have done a lot to both intentionally and unintentionally remove the fighting spirit and masculinity of men. Boys are treated like "defective girls" as psychologist Michael Thompson put it. Their natural energy and rambunctiousness is suppressed with rules and even drugs. Their preoccupation with action-based play, mock battles, and games that center on good vs. evil have become punishable offenses.

They tell young men that their masculinity is evil, and needs to be reduced if not eliminated entirely. It's "toxic," and needs to be reimagined to be softer, passive... and quiet. In media, the men are no loner displayed as strong, they're not put into leadership roles, and if they are, then there's always a female counterpart who is always better in every way that counts. Stars even go so far as to display themselves in women's clothing, showing that masculinity is just a social construct and men should embrace this new softer side of themselves by acting like women. //

Of course, then there's the way society comes down on masculinity in social situations. Commercials like the Gillette "We Believe" ad painted the very nature of men as ridiculous and awful, and while the pushback cost P&G billions, all it did was teach big stage tastemakers not to attack men directly and do it subversively instead. Corporations began promoting "transgender" people, celebrating males becoming females.

There were also legal punishments for being masculine, and you saw that recently in the form of Daniel Penny, a man who stood up for the innocent and took down a violent criminal, neutralizing him and saving others. Penny was thankfully found innocent in a court of law, but let's not pretend this wasn't an attempt to dissuade onlooking men from being a hero when the time came.

Carl Jackson brought up this very point in a recent program where he said, "if you abolish chivalry, you increase the nanny state." He brings up the fact that the left wants me to "tuck their testicles" and notes, as I have, that they've been "largely successful." //

We have to start celebrating masculinity. We have to start encouraging boys to be boys. We have to make men dangerous again.

Because a free, stable society cannot exist if dangerous men aren't there to protect and maintain it. There is no civilization if men aren't willing to fight for it. There is no order if dangerous men aren't willing to establish it. //

Magnus
8 hours ago
Dr Peterson has discussed this with details. Dangerous, disciplined, chivalrous men who are locked and loaded. Mr. Penny comes to mind.