The Bounty Review

Two centuries of caricature get dismantled here, and Anthony Hopkins does most of the work. His Bligh is not a sadist but a competent, socially anxious navigator who cannot bear being liked less than his friend, and the performance stays tight and unhappy right through the court martial framing that Robert Bolt built back when the project still belonged to David Lean.

Mel Gibson's Fletcher Christian is the weaker half, drifting rather than breaking, so the mutiny arrives as a mood instead of a decision. Arthur Ibbetson shot the Tahitian passages and the Cape Horn attempt on a full sailing replica, and the storm sequences have a wet, punishing physicality that no digital ocean since has matched. Laurence Olivier, presiding as Lord Hood, works at about a quarter power and still sets the temperature of the room.

Vangelis scores the whole thing with synthesizers, which dates badly against the rigging and the canvas and keeps dragging the film back to 1984. Daniel Day-Lewis, as the master John Fryer, has perhaps eight minutes and fills them with a particular kind of resentful correctness, the officer who is right and knows what being right will cost him. The film is honest about how small a ship is and how long the silences get.