Trouble in Paradise: 'The Bounty': Mutiny and Music

I first watched the 1984 film The Bounty when I was around ten years old (probably a bit young, but I had slightly unusual tastes in entertainment since I’ve basically always been old). Still love it, years later. It certainly benefits from an astonishingly stellar cast: Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Laurence Olivier, Edward Fox, and…Neil Morrissey. Hopkins’ portrayal of Lieutenant William Bligh is wonderfully nuanced, showing him not as the two-dimensional, villainous tyrant of earlier film versions, but as a flawed man, full of ambition and inflexible in his views regarding discipline, yet also a phenomenal sailor, who somehow managed to navigate some 4,000 miles in a small launch more or less from memory. Gibson was probably the most famous star at the time the film was made, but I wouldn’t dismiss his performance as merely that of a pretty boy. His Fletcher Christian is volatile and unpredictable, yet somehow susceptible. The deterioration of the friendship between Christian and Bligh is played out not only within the oppressive confines of the ominously creaking ship, but also on the sun-drenched, palm-fringed beaches of Tahiti. Underlying all is the sense of Britain’s colonial mission with all its disquieting aspiration and condescension, together with landlubber class divisions and discords inevitably conveyed on board ship with the rats and the grog and the fear of death at sea.

Another factor which makes this a great film for me is Vangelis’ atmospheric score, which manages to build tension (the opening title sequence is heavy with a sense of impending doom) and convey the exhilaration of discovery and the lush beauty of a Pacific paradise. It has always seemed to me that Vangelis’ end-title music (my favourite) expresses some sort of resignation: this was bound to happen; this is how people are; this is how things unfold. The music underlines the film’s message that this is not about two-dimensional, good-versus-evil characters. Still, it’s a damn good story; the more so, because it’s pretty much all true. I was delighted to find this complete isolated score on YouTube, particularly since it features the End Titles with the original drum sound, which was lowered on the Themes CD. I used to repeatedly play the end credits on the TV as a child and crouch close to hear that incisive sound atop the lush expansiveness of Vangelis’ music.

So, basically, after all that, if you’ve never seen The Bounty, I would recommend you seek it out.