Not having read the books, I don’t know if Aubrey is supposed to be a bit of an oaf(…)
Not having read the books indeed! Yet not having read them, he spends half his review finding unbelievable quite a few plot points that come right out of them…like what he calls Stephen Maturin’s “insubordination” and “[his] suggestion to the captain that he ‘tip the men’s grog over the side'”. He then has the gall to suggest that Maturin’s attitude here is “Wesleyan”, without apparently understanding that a) Maturin is a Catholic, and b) Maturin is a real, honest to God physician who practices “modern” medicine (and in fact, wrote the book — at least two of them up through Treason’s Harbor — on the subject).
I usually enjoy Bowman’s reviews but this one just plain suffers from his not having read the novels. Aubrey an oaf? Indeed — and a hell of a lot more in the books than he is in the movie…:) Maturin insubordinate? Not if you understand the relationship between the two men. And Bowman doesn’t.
[LATER, UPON MORE REFLECTION] FWIW, I don’t think you have to read the novels to enjoy the movie, or to understand the dynamic between Aubrey and Maturin. Neither does Bowman, apparently, but I object to his 2 stars (I think it’s one of the best movies to come out in years) and I object to his automatic assumption that he can authoritatively speak to the O’Brian characters in the way that he does without reading the novels.
As a matter of fact, I definitely remember Aubrey saying “Did I kill a relative of his in battle perhaps?” in one of the books (possibly The Surgeon’s Mate, when they were being chased by the privateer Liberty, but I can’t find the passage I’m looking for; or it might have been in Desolation Island when they were being chased by the Dutch ship of the line Waakzaamheid), and it may well be that he prefaced that question with the phrase, “What is it with this man?” (he definitely said something of the sort, although it might have been more along the lines of “What has this man against me?” or similar). Either way, I don’t think it’s really all that worthy of notice.
I did find it interesting that many of the plot elements in the movie were pulled out of Master and Commander, the first book in the series, while the main plot thread comes out of The Far Side of the World, which is the 10th (out of 20). Interestingly (and again, because he is not familiar with the books), Bowman is also not aware that the enemy ship in The Far Side of the World is actually an American privateer. The French connection was ginned up for the movie; I have no idea why.