When did Hollywood action movies get so complicated? Walking out of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl a few weeks ago, I was struck by the convolutions that were introduced into what should have been a straightforward story about a captain trying to regain control of his (cursed, mutinous) ship. Throw in a love triangle, OK, though the screenwriters' failure to involve the film's single most interesting character, the nutty Hunter S. Thompson/Keith Richards hybrid played by Johnny Depp, is beyond me. And pirate gold, fine. Even cursed pirate gold, OK. And cursed pirates, uh-huh, who become skeletons when struck by moonlight. And a mysterious artifact that requires the blood of cursed pirates in order to lift said curse. (Gawd, wake me when this is over.) By the time of the film's extended coda, in which the romantic entanglements that should have been addressed during the action climax are finally, tediously resolved, Pirates had a bad, bad case of story fatigue.

Of course Pirates is to a significant degree a send-up of high-seas adventure movies (a genre that the bulk of its audience is probably too young to remember ever existing), which I guess excuses the cavalier, kitchen-sink plotting. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is, by contrast, the real deal - an actual high-seas adventure movie - And the story is beautifully uncomplicated: during the Napoleonic Wars, an English captain and his ship are outfoxed and nearly dispatched early on by a French captain and his outsized super-vessel, the feared Acheron. The ensuing cat-and-mouse game, in which the battered HMS Surprise is repaired and refitted to pursue its faster, more heavily armed rival, spans 138 minutes - with no significant diversions from the course save some lovely extended scenes in which the Surprise's crew makes landfall on the largely unexplored Galapagos Islands.

That's not, of course, to say that nothing happens. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is written within an inch of its life, bustling with witty dialogue and clever ironies - OK, some of it's merely "witty" and "clever," but I'll take 'em - and straightahead action sequences that reliably reach the twin zeniths of terror and exhilaration. Peter Weir directs with a cool hand, milking maximum trepidation out of scenes depicting the essential vulnerability - and, thus, the requisite bravery - of men in their wooden boats and the splintering chaos of seafaring combat. The film's opening sequence is a model of narrative tension, with the Surprise skirting close to a thick fog bank and an uncertain young midshipman trying to figure out whether he really did glimpse the shadow of another, unfriendly vessel out there in the emptiness.

Yes, I'd prefer a sustained build to the immediate introduction of pyrotechnics, but I'd be outvoted on any studio lot. Besides, the effect here is magnificent, a noisy and gloriously expensive spectacle delivered as the film's declaration of intentions. From there, Weir has free rein to develop his characters, with mixed results. It's never less than great fun to watch Russell Crowe, playing Jack Aubrey, the titular master and commander, stomp around his boat. Crowe looks the part, though he may play too level-headed and self-conscious for a gruff naval captain - even one who doles out puns and philosophy over the dinner table. (Now if Johnny Depp had been cast as Lucky Jack, well, what a movie that might have made.)

What starts to hit the nerves is the character of his right-hand man, Dr. Stephen Maturin, designed in every way to act as either complement or contrast to his testosterone-pumped friend. The bickering that takes place is too clearly representative of the uneasy relationship between men of science and their military counterparts, as is the running joke about how Stephen's desire to explore the Galapagos Islands as a naturalist is repeatedly foiled by Aubrey's deep-rooted need to give chase to the Acheron, wherever she may be bound.

So many storytelling seams are visible that it's difficult to make a real emotional investment in the characters. For instance, the film has a strange way of treating the inevitable deaths - including combat casualties, an act of God and a suicide - among the ship's crew. Attention is certainly paid to their passing, with funerals and body bags represented on screen in scenes that dutifully attempt to depict the human toll taken on men by war. (Aubrey storms through his ship to evaluate the damage after one attack, asking, "What's the butcher's bill?") But, given Weir's general failure to generate emotional gravitas, they also feel arbitrary and artificial. One shot is held for an awfully long time, as a young crewmember who's been abruptly de-shipped bobs up and down helplessly among the storm waves as the Surprise floats away from him. Yes, the lingering shot is clearly meant to evoke horror and desparation at the idea that a man overboard would be abandoned by his shipmates; it's also a special-effects showcase, with the human actor clearly adrift in a mass of computer-generated water. The poor guy eventually disappears from view, swallowed up in the fierce digital storm, but there's a weird, mechanical feeling to the scene - I wondered if the poor soul might be found, disoriented, wandering around somewhere in the basement of Industrial Light + Magic.

I don't mean to gripe too much about this essential weightlessness. Master and Commander is an accessible, engrossing, technically proficient adventure movie with an intriguing star performance, convincing production design, and state-of-the-art special-effects work. It's exactly the thing that Hollywood is supposed to be proficient at, and, even at 138 minutes (five minutes shorter than Pirates of the Caribbean!) I never found myself wishing it was over already. The sound design is a marvel all in itself, sloshing water against all four walls of the screening room, backward and forward again. And the cinematography by Russell Boyd (who has shot other Weirs, including Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave) is top-notch, helping create a fairly seamless integration of filmed images with their CGI enhancements, yet retaining a classical sensibility that helps the very state-of-the-art imagery lean into the timeless - the enveloping world he helps create is rich and cool, with highlights just discernable inside rich, bluish-black shadows that suggest the details both visible and hidden amid all the waters of the ocean.