I'm no expert, but twenty-three or four sounds just about plausible-ish, assuming that the crew basically sees Erik as being in command and Christine as his charismatic figurehead puppet :-p Does the plot absolutely require her to be the captain? It might make just as much sense for some OC to be the captain and Christine simply to be a trusted crew member, along the lines of Annamaria in PoTC. Basically, if she's going to be plausible in command she's got to have a really good reason for other people taking her orders -- like 'can beat any of you in a one-on-one duel' (Mary Sue territory), 'comes up with brilliant schemes for making lots of money', 'knows how to play crew politics in order to convince everybody to back her against more credible authority figures', 'has some kind of magical power supporting her' (again, Mary Sue territory), 'is really good at reading the wind and weather conditions' (what, better than men of forty years' experience?), 'is the blood relative/protegée of some other powerful figure who has to be propitiated' (again, Mary Sue...) It's like Hollywood producing leading female scientist characters but having them as beautiful thirty-year-old blondes instead of no-nonsense women with no make-up, glasses and grey hair -- the reason why female captains in PoTC fiction are almost always Mary Sues is that it's really difficult to put a lovely young woman into a role normally occupied by unattractive men with lots of practical experience *without* giving her a whole load of overpowered backstory to justify why she has leapfrogged over the heads of everyone else :-(
Not sure how old Captain Blood was supposed to be; he'd completed his medical training (however long *that* took in the seventeenth century) and been in practice for a while before he ever ended up in the West Indies, so not all that youthful.
I like the film a good deal better than Sabatini's novel (which falls into his usual trap of gratuitous anti-intellectualism; brains without brawn equals villainous envy of the handsome, muscular hero), but it's not Flynn's best work -- he was very inexperienced and a bit self-conscious here, and it shows. (And he's completely incapable of pulling off the Irish accent written into the dialogue; they should just have let him play it straight!)
I enjoyed "The Black Swan", "The Crimson Pirate" and "The Pirates of Capri" as well...
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Does the plot absolutely require her to be the captain? It might make just as much sense for some OC to be the captain and Christine simply to be a trusted crew member, along the lines of Annamaria in PoTC. Basically, if she's going to be plausible in command she's got to have a really good reason for other people taking her orders -- like 'can beat any of you in a one-on-one duel' (Mary Sue territory), 'comes up with brilliant schemes for making lots of money', 'knows how to play crew politics in order to convince everybody to back her against more credible authority figures', 'has some kind of magical power supporting her' (again, Mary Sue territory), 'is really good at reading the wind and weather conditions' (what, better than men of forty years' experience?), 'is the blood relative/protegée of some other powerful figure who has to be propitiated' (again, Mary Sue...)
It's like Hollywood producing leading female scientist characters but having them as beautiful thirty-year-old blondes instead of no-nonsense women with no make-up, glasses and grey hair -- the reason why female captains in PoTC fiction are almost always Mary Sues is that it's really difficult to put a lovely young woman into a role normally occupied by unattractive men with lots of practical experience *without* giving her a whole load of overpowered backstory to justify why she has leapfrogged over the heads of everyone else :-(
Not sure how old Captain Blood was supposed to be; he'd completed his medical training (however long *that* took in the seventeenth century) and been in practice for a while before he ever ended up in the West Indies, so not all that youthful.
I like the film a good deal better than Sabatini's novel (which falls into his usual trap of gratuitous anti-intellectualism; brains without brawn equals villainous envy of the handsome, muscular hero), but it's not Flynn's best work -- he was very inexperienced and a bit self-conscious here, and it shows. (And he's completely incapable of pulling off the Irish accent written into the dialogue; they should just have let him play it straight!)
I enjoyed "The Black Swan", "The Crimson Pirate" and "The Pirates of Capri" as well...