Why Are So Many Guys Obsessed With ‘Master and Commander’?

March—2023. 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.

But 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. Think of it as the male biological clock: Alex Yablon, who works for the New York City Council, said that he rewatched the movie after the birth of his first child. He’s since listened to eight of the original source material audiobooks—with only 12 left to go.

“For me, personally, there’s a lot of stuff that I have gotten into as I have accepted that I’m in my mid-thirties, that I’m a dad, that I’m boring now. I do boring shit, I read boring history books, and I mostly am pretty fine with that. I’m okay with being a little bit of a goofy, boring dad,” Yablon told me. “And I think that the way of sheepishly admitting that and kind of making fun of that a little bit is by being into such a cliché dad thing: naval adventure stories.”

Despite any surface-level irony, everyone I talked to adopted a tone of reverence and awe when speaking about the movie. They would get a misty, far-away sound in their voice, almost as if they were on the bow of a ship, gazing out over the open ocean, ponytail flapping in the breeze.

Will Menaker, the co-host of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, said, “I don’t know how there could be ironic fans of a movie that’s this brilliant—a movie that does onscreen everything movies promise. What’s bad about this movie?”

“I always think of the scene where Aubrey and Maturin are playing their cello and violin—you’re hearing that and it’s just sort of taking you around the ship and it’s all very quiet. And then there’s just a moment where the camera goes underneath the boat and it’s a shot of the anchor trailing through the ocean as you hear the slightly muffled sounds of Aubrey and Maturin’s music,” he continued. “I just always am so struck by the beauty of that moment and the fact that every single conceivable detail about the social hierarchies and physical maintenance of this vessel is so lovingly crafted. It’s the historical verisimilitude of it and just how it does a very rare thing for movies of this nature—it’s like the battles are almost incidental.”

Sure, there are no female characters in the movie (except for the ship, and the wooden lady on the ship). But overall, the masculinity of Master and Commander, especially as modeled by Aubrey, is overwhelmingly wholesome and positive. Any nostalgia for the traditionalism in the movie is less reactionary and more about the healthy male bonding between the characters.

“You’ve got a bromance for the ages in Aubrey and Maturin,” Menaker said. “They’re just fucking buds and they play their violins together as they’re traversing the Cape of Horn. It’s awesome.” Writer David Grossman told me that Master and Commander is “a deeply felt vision of non-toxic masculinity,” while Alex Yablon pointed to it as “a portrait of healthy homosociality.” Even director Taika Waititi once called it his favorite romance movie.

Russell Crowe is also particularly magnetic. Rachel Millman, the writer and Wrestlesplania podcast host who once remarked on Twitter that, “every February becomes Master and Commander month on here,” brought up his specific appeal. “He’s very much a ‘dudes rock’ type of guy,” she said. “I don’t think dudes rock is exclusive to men anymore. You’re underselling yourself when you’re like, ‘This is a thing for boys.’ No, it’s just the attitude of ‘that guy rocks, he does what he wants, he’s great.’”

The idea that it could be fulfilling to live and work on the HMS Surprise—again, a 19th century ship, with all that entails—is also part of the allure for the modern viewer. I recently rewatched Master and Commander early one morning and found myself overtaken by wistful bonhomie. Wouldn’t it feel satisfying to spend each day doing industrious and meaningful ship work, I thought, and then retire to candlelit dinners and violin-playing each night? As New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane put it in his review, “we feel ourselves to be in good company with these men, and strangely jealous of their packed and salted lives.”

Grossman pointed to the friendship crisis among American men. “When you’re in your thirties, you’re looking for this sort of community. This is the age when settling down starts to happen,” he said. “Friends start to drop off and you have to take more active steps to find a community of male friends, and more guys report loneliness. I guess seeing that rich community strikes some as, ‘yeah, that’s what I want—just to be on a ship with 150 other guys.’”

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 fucking 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 fucking 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.”