Oceans Are Now Battlefields?
By 
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is evidently now more popular that it has ever been…
It’s rare in 2025 that the physical release of a 20 year old film is met with such fervor. Delight is especially high among members of America’s military community. Soldiers, officers, journalists, and the extremely online NatSec weirdos love Master and Commander. Like Star Wars, the movie has become a lingua franca in U.S. military circles where it’s a source of memes and concepts that drives discussion.
“There’s no doubt that Master and Commander is beloved within the national security community. What’s harder to explain is ‘why,’” Robert Farley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky, told 404 Media. Farley said he just rewatched the movie two weeks ago after forcing a friend to watch who’d never seen it.
“If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because the movie depicts the tight functioning of a community of warfighters, a community that is mostly comfortable with itself…and yet is deeply grounded in English social structure,” Farley said. “As in any well-functioning military, everyone has a place to be and a job to do. Jack Aubrey isn’t so much brilliant as ‘lucky,’ which adds to the workmanlike aspect. I’d say that there’s a male bonding aspect to it (I don’t believe any female character has even a single line), but I know plenty of women in the NatSec space who will quote ‘Oceans are battlefields’ in everyday conversation.”
Master and Commander was a success in its time but not such a success that the studio would be willing to invest in a sequel; shooting at sea was always going to be extremely expensive which made any follow up inherently risky. Apparently Crowe was interested in returning but he was also one of the biggest stars in the world in 2003 and so he wasn’t going to come cheap. Weirdly I think Paul Bettany is now a bigger draw than Crowe, mostly on the strength of his MCU work.
Anyway, I find the afterlife of film and TV fascinating; how certain artifacts drop out of sight entirely while others take up much greater space in the cultural gestalt than could have been expected when they debuted. Master and Commander is certainly a worthy work and I’m glad that it has found a way back into the consciousness.
Photo Credit: By Comisión Mexicana de Filmaciones – , CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65382400