If looks could kill.

THE critics have spoken, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has passed muster. According to www.rottentomatoes.com, a website that keeps track of such things, 85 percent of the film's reviews have been positive--and that's not counting the syndicated columnists and bloggers who have weighed in to like effect. And even though Master and Commander contains no women, no nudity, no laser beams, and (best of all) no Ben Affleck, it's a solid box-office hit to boot.

To date, the only resistance to Peter Weir's cinematic version of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels about the British Navy in the days of Napoleon has come from those vexed by the fact that Weir and John Collee, who co-wrote the screenplay, have played fast and loose with the sacred texts on which the film is based. Such grousing was inevitable, for O'Brian's fans are as obsessed with the fine detail of their saga as any Harry Potter addict or Baker Street Irregular, and Master and Commander is in no way a literal adaptation. Instead, it recombines elements of several O'Brian novels into a single plot, and goes its own sweet way on countless occasions. Heresy! quoth the outraged buffs. Murder on the high seas! Clap those men in irons--or, better yet, give them a taste of the cat.

Such folk, like the poor, will always be with us, and will always be ignored. Hollywood doesn't make movies for people who read books. People who read books do go to movies, however, and one of them, Christopher Hitchens, panned Master and Commander in Slate. Now Hitchens is a contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it's right and he's wrong. Yet he put his finger on an aspect of the film about which the trailer had left me extremely suspicious:

   The summa of O'Brian's genius was the
   invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is
   the ship's gifted surgeon, but he is also a
   scientist, an espionage agent for the
   Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part
   Catalan birth--and a revolutionary. He
   joins the British side, having earlier
   fought against it, because of his hatred
   for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles
   of 1789--principles that are perfectly
   obscure to bluff Capt. Jack
   Aubrey.... As played by the admittedly
   handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany,
   Maturin is no more than a good doctor
   with finer feelings and a passion for natural
   history.... A superficial buddy
   movie is born out of one of the subtlest
   and richest and most paradoxical male
   relationships since Holmes and Watson.

All this sounded dangerously plausible to me. I've read the Aubrey-Maturin series several times and admire it deeply (if not uncritically), but I also recognize that its virtues are of a sort not easily transferred to the screen. O'Brian's books are not traditional tales of action, even though they contain plenty of derring-do. They consist mainly of talk--in fact, they read like Trollope on a boat--and are as much about the interior drama of moral conflict as knocking Boney on the head.

For this reason, I took it for granted that Master and Commander would either depart drastically from O'Brian or be a long-winded bore. A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity, after all, can never be more than a species of illustration--a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. The smarter approach is for the director to subject his source material to an imaginative transformation that gives the adaptation an independent life as a free-standing art object in its own right. (It's easier to turn a great novel into a great opera than a great film.) But if you do that, you're likely to alienate the pre-sold audience of loyal fans whose existence is the reason popular books get filmed in the first place. As far as they're concerned, the more literal the adaptation, the better--and I, hardened aesthete though I am, couldn't quite keep myself from feeling the same way. This made me of two minds regarding Master and Commander: I knew it couldn't convey more than a fractional part of the subtleties of O'Brian's novels, but I went to see it anyway, hoping against hope that the images on the screen would at least approximate the ones in my head.

Two hours and twenty minutes later, I didn't have any images left in my head. They'd been replaced by the infinitely more vivid ones created by Weir and his resourceful collaborators. The narrow decks and low ceilings of H.M.S. Surprise, the Dantean clamor of a naval battle, the stomach-clutching sight of weevils crawling out of a piece of ship's biscuit--all these things look and sound so right in Master and Commander that it becomes impossible to envision them any other way. What's more, Russell Crowe, who plays Aubrey, is as good as he (or anyone else) could possibly be. From now on, I'll see him in my mind's eye whenever I read O'Brian.

Is that enough? Of course not, but it doesn't need to be enough. Yes, Peter Weir has turned a Trollopian romanfleuve into an action movie, a completely exteriorized view of the Aubrey-Maturin novels--but what an exterior! Yes, you've got to go back to the novels if you want to know what Stephen Maturin is really like--but what, pray tell, is wrong with that? And as Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, Master and Commander may simplify O'Brian, but it hews scrupulously to his passionate belief in the military virtues: "Its depiction of the more ancient notions of duty, honor, patriotism, and devotion is reminiscent of what we glimpsed during live coverage of the dash to Baghdad back in April, but is now slipping from memory."

I rank Master and Commander among the best war films ever made, and I wouldn't be surprised if further viewings (for I mean to see it again as soon as I can) inspire me to put it at the very top of the list. It is stirring, enthralling, and endlessly pleasing to the eye. If you want more than that, you know what to do.

Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journaland the film critic of Crisis, blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.