Ridley Scott’s war cry against the fierce criticism of his Napoleon is graphic: “Fuck you!” There is in these three words a whole way of trying to win with insults what you lose in the movie theaters. And look, I feel sorry for the man who directed the masterpiece The Duelists. But his new film about the little great emperor doesn’t just disappoint. Worse, it’s boring.
Agree that Napoleon is not a history lesson and that this kind of big screen stories are due to creativity, setting, photography and costumes. Ten cameras rolling at the same time… The problem is not even these cinematic liberties, but that Scott has tried to demystify a multi-faceted character like Napoleon Bonaparte and almost reinvent him as an unlikable, flower in the ass and without charisma. The anti-epic
One eagerly awaited Joaquin Phoenix and his performance. He is a good actor, he was good in Gladiator. Here he signs one of his worst, histrionic roles. He seems more like a joker than one of the story’s strategists.
The overall result? A can with a surprising absence of historical, political and military rigor. For example, these examples: the pyramids are solved with two pipes; Austerlitz in the snow and with mass deaths on the frozen lake; Waterloo is the battle of the Somme; the Russian campaign is summed up in a Cossack ambush, a thirty-second retreat and the abdication that takes him to Elba.
Ah, of which there is a lot (and in excess) of the fringe with Josefina, but the sex of the ronec.
Beyond the historical slips or the simplification of the passages of the battles, Napoleon does not entertain either. What a shame. It is articulated in a succession of scenes without anything being clear, neither the why, nor the how. What makes Napoleon Napoleon? Even politics appears there as something futile, irrelevant. And in the end you don’t care if they are wins or losses.
What has made it to the cinema is said to be a sketch of Ridley Scott’s macro project, cut for commercial reasons. A bad film is hardly fixed by adding more minutes to the footage. If two long hours become eternal, imagine five. unbearable
