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Why Master and Commander Is a Great Star Trek Movie in Disguise
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Master and Commander
Why Master and Commander Is a Great Star Trek Movie in Disguise
Guided by naval structure and a captain who adores his best friend (the ship’s doctor), the two series have more than a few items in common.
By Don Kaye
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Published on September 10, 2025
Credit: 20th Century Fox
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Credit: 20th Century Fox
Some 22 years after its release, the reputation of director Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World continues to grow. Based loosely on elements of three novels by British author Patrick O’Brian from his “Aubrey-Maturin” series, the film is set in 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, and follows English captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his warship, the HMS Surprise, as he plays a game of cat-and-mouse with a superior French privateer vessel, the Acheron.
Even as he matches wits, strategy, and firepower with the unseen commander of the Acheron, Aubrey also tussles intellectually and philosophically with his close friend, ship surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), while also managing the lives, superstitions, morale, and abilities of his loyal crew, whose complement ranges from grizzled veterans of the sea to boys not even of high school age.
Although it was nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, Master and Commander wasn’t a box office success. Yet as is often the case with great films that happen to come out at the wrong time—and Master and Commander is a superb movie—the film has found an audience through cable, streaming, and home video over the years. Critics have reaffirmed its overall excellence and accuracy as both a thrilling high-seas epic and a study of human beings behaving at the edge of endurance with dignity and honor, while also reappraising it as a “beacon of positive masculinity.”
There’s another way to look at Master and Commander as well, and that’s through the lens of science fiction: if you replace the HMS Surprise with the USS Enterprise, and swap out Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin for Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, Master and Commander could be reconfigured as an outstanding episode or film from Star Trek: The Original Series. Parallels abound between the two, and while I don’t think Patrick O’Brian was influenced by Star Trek in any way (I have no way of knowing if he even saw the show), he began writing the books in 1969, just as Star Trek was finishing its network run on NBC.
O’Brian reportedly based the character of Jack Aubrey on one or two real-life Royal Navy captains: Lord Thomas Cochrane and Captain William Wolseley, both of whom employed tactics mirrored in O’Brian’s books and the movie. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, meanwhile, was famously inspired by C.S. Forester’s books about the fictional Captain Horatio Hornblower, a similar set of Royal Navy adventures set largely during the Napoleonic Wars and penned between 1937 and 1967. Roddenberry melded this with his “Wagon Train to the stars” concept, seasoned with a helping of Forbidden Planet and A.E. Van Vogt’s Space Beagle stories.
Whatever their disparate influences, however, Roddenberry and O’Brian came up with concepts that are eerily analogous to each other in terms of certain storylines, character traits, and the exploration of social and command hierarchies within a naval military structure. Even allowing for sails instead of warp engines, and cannons rather than photon torpedoes, there’s a shared pedigree. Some examples:
Jack Aubrey, Meet James T. Kirk
Credit: 20th Century Fox
As played by Russell Crowe, Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey is a singular shipmaster. He knows every nook and cranny of his ship, the HMS Surprise, and he seems to know what she’s capable of even when his crew isn’t sure. He commands complete respect from his officers and crew, and seems to find the right balance of compassion and steely authority—although he sometimes finds it difficult to communicate one and one with individual members of the crew, especially as he feels tremendous responsibility for their well-being and safety.
Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) shares many of the same attributes (although the slight detachment from the crew may be a little more present in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Jean-Luc Picard). Like Aubrey, Kirk knows the Enterprise from bridge to shuttlecraft bay doors, has earned the respect and admiration of the crew, and can be both an authoritative field commander as well as a humanist.
Kirk often waxes about the loneliness of command on a deep space vessel, and his personal history is littered with several serious relationships that went south as well as a long trail of brief liaisons (which, more often than not, simply served the plot of a particular episode). We don’t learn much about Aubrey’s personal background in the film Master and Commander (in the books, he’s married with children, a fact only acknowledged in passing in the film), but there is a moment when the Surprise stops at a port in Brazil to pick up supplies, and Aubrey shares eye contact with a beautiful native woman on a boat, offering her a wistful smile. It’s a moment that says a lot about the life he’s chosen to lead, and the sacrifices he has perhaps had to make.
Lucky Jack vs. the Kobayashi Maru
Credit: Paramount
Shortly after having his backside handed to him for the second time by the captain of the Acheron—who nearly cripples the Surprise with one sneak attack and almost succeeds at springing another, costing the lives of several seamen—Captain Aubrey is sitting in his cabin with Dr. Maturin when the latter notes that the captain is “not accustomed to defeat,” adding that his obsessive pursuit of the Acheron is “beginning to smack of pride” and that the Surprise should have turned back weeks earlier—an observation that Aubrey doesn’t much enjoy.
James Kirk famously doesn’t “like to lose” either and—as detailed in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—even reprograms the Kobayashi Maru simulation in his Academy days so that he can defeat a no-win battle scenario. “You have never faced death,” his son David Marcus says to Kirk later, after Spock has sacrificed himself to save the Enterprise. “No,” Kirk replies. “Not like this… I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity.” Aubrey doesn’t “cheat” his way out of any situation in Master and Commander, but the two captains are both almost too proud to acknowledge when they’ve been bested, a source of both their strength and their potential undoing.
Yet both captains are also all too willing to stop their mission or reverse course if a crew member needs urgent, immediate care. In Master and Commander, Aubrey calls off his pursuit of the Acheron and heads for the Galapagos Islands after Maturin is accidentally shot, requiring the doctor to perform surgery on himself that can only be done on dry land. In the Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” Kirk disobeys a direct order from Starfleet to attend a diplomatic event when he learns that Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) must be taken to Vulcan or he’ll die. Both men are willing to put the well-being of another person first—at great personal or professional cost.
You Can Tell Your Doctor
Credit: 20th Century Fox
The relationships between the ship’s captain and the ship’s doctor in Master and Commander and Star Trek have different contexts but are essentially the same. In the former, Aubrey and Maturin are old friends (a relationship explored in great detail across O’Brian’s novels) and the surgeon often advises Aubrey in the most personal terms, acting as his therapist, his conscience, and his sounding board. Their conversations in the captain’s cabin sometimes set them at odds, as when Maturin questions Aubrey’s motives in pursuing the Acheron and pushing his crew to extremes, or when Maturin insists on allowing time for a scientific expedition. “We do not have time for your damned hobbies, sir!” the captain shouts at him angrily.
Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) has almost the exact same relationship with Captain Kirk. While he and Kirk don’t play music together, they do enjoy a drink in the Captain’s cabin, where Kirk expresses his own doubts, fears, and concerns to his old friend and Academy colleague. Like Maturin, McCoy is perhaps the only person on the ship who can speak to Kirk candidly—sometimes to the point of insubordination. “I have no time for you, your theories, your quaint philosophies!” sputters an angry Kirk at McCoy during a tense moment in the episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” Both the Aubrey-Maturin and Kirk-McCoy relationships, however, always come back to a place of mutual respect and—while they may not express it—love.
I’m a Doctor… and a Naturalist
Screenshot: 20th Century Fox
While Dr. Maturin has many parallels with Dr. McCoy, as portrayed in the film Master and Commander, he’s actually sort of a synthesis of both McCoy and Mr. Spock. All three men abhor war, and while Maturin operates on a much more emotional level than Spock, he shares the latter’s insatiable scientific curiosity. As the Surprise chases the Acheron into southern waters, the ship arrives at the Galapagos Islands, where Maturin plans an expedition by foot in search of new species of animals, birds, and marine life. But when Aubrey discovers that the Acheron is only a day away, he cancels Maturin’s expedition much to the latter’s chagrin. Maturin places the possibility of scientific discovery far above the pursuit of the enemy, to Aubrey’s annoyance.
Likewise, Mr. Spock has occasionally risked safety and security in pursuit of scientific knowledge. In the classic Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark,” he advises a team of security personnel to try and capture the creature known as the Horta—in almost explicit defiance of Kirk’s order to kill it on sight. While Kirk eventually comes around to Spock’s thinking, he admonishes the science officer for contradicting his command—a rare instance of Spock getting genuinely embarrassed.
Both Spock and Maturin, however, do share an unswerving sense of duty. Spock, for example, is just as willing to kill the Horta when Kirk’s life is in jeopardy, while Maturin, after finally getting his chance to explore a little of the Galapagos, voluntarily cuts his own expedition short and leaves his specimens behind when he spies the Acheron hiding on the other side of the island.
“In a Different Reality, I Could Have Called You Friend”
Credit: Paramount
The plot of Master and Commander echoes that of an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that’s considered among its very best: “Balance of Terror.” In that segment, a hostile vessel from the Romulan Empire crosses into Federation space and attacks several outposts, forcing Kirk to pursue the vessel in a tense game of chess between him and the Romulan commander that could lead to interstellar war. The two captains try to out-think each other, with Kirk and the Romulan commander earning each other’s grudging respect. Meanwhile, various subplots play out throughout the narrative, with an officer accusing Spock of possibly being a Romulan spy and a young couple on board the Enterprise trying to get married.
Master and Commander finds Aubrey trying to outwit the French privateer captain as well, although we never actually meet the latter (or do we? It’s left open-ended for a sequel that sadly never came). As in “Balance of Terror,” there are other stories happening below decks on the Surprise, including the haunting clash between a midshipman and several seamen that ends with the former taking his own life.
Many of the strategies deployed by Aubrey are similar to those used by Kirk in “Balance of Terror” and other episodes, most notably when Aubrey disguises the Surprise as a whaling ship to lure the Acheron into a trap. In a similar move, Kirk pretends that the Enterprise has been crippled, gambling that the Romulan will draw close enough for a full-on attack. Whether on the open ocean or in deep space, the tactics are the same and the outcomes often comparable as well. And when there is loss of life among their crews as a result of their decisions, both Aubrey and Kirk must confront it—and live with it.
Of course, Master and Commander doesn’t line up exactly with Star Trek in a few substantial ways: for one thing, the crew of the Surprise (and almost the entire cast of the movie) is completely male and largely white. There are no women at all on board and only a few faces of color toiling below decks, which is simply a matter of historical accuracy. Set in the distant future, Star Trek aimed for diversity from the start, putting a Black woman, a man of Japanese descent, and an extra-terrestrial on the ship’s command bridge (truly groundbreaking for 1966) and continued to strive—not always successfully but generally in good faith—for a multiplicity of races, genders, and species among its regular and guest characters.
In addition, the British Empire, colonizers and aggressors in their own right, are not the 19th century equivalent to the far more peace-oriented Federation. The Royal Navy at the time is on much more of a war footing than Starfleet, which has a primary mission of exploration and outreach, only deploying military force as a defensive measure.But on the whole, with its themes of duty, honor, compassion, and sacrifice, its conflict between military action and scientific exploration, and its compelling look at life among a ship’s crew voyaging to the furthest reaches of human understanding, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World shares much more in common with Star Trek than not—whether the ship and its crew are on the far side of the world or the far side of the galaxy.[end-mark]
The post Why <i>Master and Commander</i> Is a Great Star Trek Movie in Disguise appeared first on Reactor.
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