Napoleon movie

I found it really disappointing. Ridley Scott is a film director, and this subject just has too much material for him to tackle. Napoleon Bonaparte's career would have been better as a mini-series or multi-season series. Hollywood stretched out The Hobbit into three long movies but took the life of one of Europe's most complex rulers and squeezed it into a tight two-and-a-half-hour film.

If you didn't come into this knowing a bit about the history, the battles and the characters I think you could be entirely lost.
 
/Sigh. I really wanted to like this movie. Early in his career (1977), Ridley Scott made The Duellists which still holds up as one of the most evocative, atmospheric depictions of the era - right down to the weird hairstyle fashions of French hussars over the years. I had high hopes. And as a student of the man and the era (an analysis of Aspern-Essling was even part of my graduate school application) I really, really wanted to see him breath life into this subject on a broad canvas. Alas.

I try not to be a history snob/nerd with this sort of stuff - it's obviously a piece of entertainment first, and sometimes liberties need to be taken to tell a story visually and concisely. But when you are dealing with real and significant historical events and people, and with a film like this one likely being the only exposure to this subject many in the audience will ever have, I feel you have a certain responsibility to keep the story at least sort of accurate. So (to me anyway) the extent of historical inaccuracy in this thing is maddening. Some spoiler-free examples, since they are in the trailers, include shooting the tops off the pyramids (what!?) and the semi-apocryphal incident of the French bombarding a frozen lake as their routed foes retreat across it representing essentially how Austerlitz was won (you know - Napoleon's masterpiece of which this scenario was purely incidental). And the battles generally are horrendous - you'd get the idea that Napoleonic warfare was herds of fancily-dressed guys (infantry and cavalry all co-mingled) charging at other herds of fancily-dressed guys. While yelling. I agree with those that cited Waterloo as a much superior depiction. And as much as I respect Joaquin Phoenix as an actor, his "Napoleon as an unlikable, mopey jerk" approach was painful to watch. So many more thoughts...but I'll end my rant here. Yep, disappointing.
 
I too was disappointed. I felt the acting was not up to par along with the story plot.
 
ccj said:
After the reviews I can’t bring myself to watch it….
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It's worth a look, so you can judge for yourself.

I recommend buying a copy, I bought this perfect Blu-ray copy back in January for 16.99 with free shipping. You can't get popcorn and a coke for you and the wife at that price. ;)

Nap.jpeg
 
It is the 'Bridgerton" version of Napoleon's life and I think that's what Scott wanted - to make a commercial success considering that he's actually an expert on all this stuff. Bridgerton is a PBS fantasy series very loosely inspired by the Jane Austen genre of this same period. The Bridgerton director describes it as "a reimagined world, we're not a history lesson, it's not a documentary. What we're really doing with the show is marrying history and fantasy in what I think is a very exciting way...." .... Total BS but immensely popular. So as we all know growing up that these epic films are tough because the big events overshadow the characters so I thought there were some good parts to the film and JP did a good job. At least he knew how to wear the hat. Actors are notorious for wanting to shove that big black hat back on their heads so you can see their faces acting but they look like Circus Ring Masters. Bad ending.... Wellington would never meet with Bonaparte. He considered him to be socially low trash and Scott knows this so why the cornball reunion? Waterloo should have been treated as the big wrap up with Napoleon leaping into his carriage to get back to Paris to consolidate his government. The retreat was immediately covered by the Grenadiers of the Guard who formed square, were surrounded, and refused to surrender. They still constituted a formidable and dangerous force so they were blasted to pieces shouting "Vive L'Empereur...Vive L'Empereur... Vive L'Empereur... as Napoleon made his way off the field listening to the echos of his veterans shouting out the end to his legacy. Now that's an ending and its too bad Scott chose not to use it. I've always admired how the French chose to honor Bonaparte not as emperor but as the supreme General of the Army and hence his burial place in Les Invalides.
 
John Josef said:
It's worth a look, so you can judge for yourself.

I recommend buying a copy, I bought this perfect Blu-ray copy back in January for 16.99 with free shipping. You can't get popcorn and a coke for you and the wife at that price. ;)
Click to expand...
I can wait to get a second hand copy on the flee market! ;-)
 
I really didn't like the Napoleon movie. The uniforms were great, as well as the visuals, but other than that, it was pretty awful. I found it to be too slow, boring (which is surprising because the Napoleonic period was such a dramatic period!), and as some French critics said, "migraine inducing". The battle scenes especially were a huge let down for me. Along with the "historical" fantasies, such as Napoleon shooting at the pyramids, Napoleon charging into battle at Borodino and Waterloo, and that one British 95th rifleman with a telescope tied to his baker rifle, I felt that Scott showed too little of the battles (even when he did have a longer sequence, like he did for Austerlitz and Waterloo, they were terribly inaccurate!), as he seemed more interested in Napoleon's relationship with Josephine than his career as a military genius. I believe that Napoleon's life should have been depicted in a TV series rather than a 2hr 30min movie, as Scott attempted to cover too much in too little time, causing the changes in events to be extremely choppy. Heck, with a TV series, certain battles could have an entire 1hr episode to themselves!
 
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