Napoleon review: Ridley Scott delivers a dynamite biopic
Joaquin Phoenix rises to the occasion in an absorbing—and surprisingly amusing—psychological portrait
Film Reviews ridley scott
Outside of military colleges, where his strategic acumen is still lauded, many present-day folks might only have a loose sense of Napoleon Bonaparte, with a bicorne hat and hand tucked in his jacket, as a man of short stature and shorter temper. Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture.
It is a film that thrillingly covers the French military commander’s ascension—from Corsican outsider to exalted emperor and, eventually, defeated exile—but also uses his domestic life to expand the viewer’s aperture of understanding of him as a man, and in turn ask them to reflect upon some of the broader frailties of humankind.
The movie opens during the French Revolution and showcases the Siege of Toulon in 1793, which makes a hero of Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix). The rest of his rise to political power and the ups and downs of the Napoleonic Wars across Europe, however, are heavily counterbalanced by Napoleon’s relationship with the woman who would become his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), an older, widowed mother of two. The pair’s marriage, and its turbulent infidelities and subsequent struggles to produce an heir, provide Scott’s film with its spine.
Early on, somewhat ill-served by a sequence in which its subject bears witness to Marie Antoinette’s beheading, Napoleon feels like it might be a “hits” packaging of rather pedestrian insights. (A quick glimpse of the French campaign in Egypt also feeds this fear.) As it unwinds, though, one becomes struck more by the scenes that are actually missing from the movie—choices which cannily reflect the shrewd judgment of David Scarpa’s script, Scott’s overall vision, and the work of editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo.
Tedious introductions to characters are absent, as are scenes of advisors arguing against war, or conquered adversaries begrudgingly acknowledging Napoleon’s genius. To a surprisingly large degree, Napoleon also eschews courtly intrigue and plotting. The bloodless coup overthrowing the ruling French Directory unfolds via montage, but in Scott’s film, there is no presentation of subsequent assassination plots during the French Consulate, no unpacking of the Haitian Revolution and territorial retrenchment of the Louisiana Purchase.
Napoleon’s family life is also presented in tightly edited terms. His brother Joseph’s assistance in securing power is shown, but there’s not much of a sense of their relationship. Other siblings are absent, as are his stepchildren. His mother, by all accounts a much more prominent figure in his life, first appears nearly an hour into the movie.
If this sounds like an indictment of the film, it’s actually the opposite; instead, Scarpa’s trim, incisive screenplay invests in the feedback loop of Napoleon’s battlefield successes and failure to find the love he so desperately needs from Joséphine—an endless struggle between two headstrong individuals, each held back by their own insecurities and anxieties.
While set against a backdrop of nationalist fervor and discontent that has undeniable parallels to the present day, the film approaches its portrait of political power somewhat sideways. As depicted, Napoleon is something of a brilliant vessel—a military tactician of considerable skill who recognizes his value to others, and often leverages that quite shrewdly, but isn’t necessarily always playing four-dimensional chess. Rather, his ambitions are presented almost as drops in a bucket, and his rise the natural result of this incremental accrual.
This approach—the intimately scaled motivations, and the smallness of their contours—helps render the character of Napoleon much more readily relatable. Whether this depiction is any more or less inherently “true” is for historians to argue. The chosen frame for this story, interestingly, shares much in common with Maestro, which unpacks Leonard Bernstein’s life and career largely through his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
Ridley Scott is a masterful creator of worlds, and one of the last working directors whose grasp extends back beyond CGI, so that he knows how to use it in complementary fashion rather than as a blunt instrument. Scott’s command of scale and historical battlefields, previously evidenced in Gladiator and Kingdom Of Heaven, is as masterful as ever, and in some ways, Napoleon feels like the culmination of his career.
But the size of the canvas doesn’t read as orgiastic excess. The film’s half-dozen battle sequences all feel like they serve a purpose, and communicate and illuminate new aspects of character, from Napoleon’s nerves at Toulon to the genius of his plan at Austerlitz, and the folly by way of arrogance found at Waterloo. This interplay between exterior action and interior revelation is the engine which drives Napoleon, and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski wonderfully translates it visually. There is a special delight to be found in the contrast of stunningly captured, smoke-laden battlefields with well-appointed rooms of power, dust floating subtly in the air.
Phoenix is justifiably regarded as one of the more compelling actors of his generation, and there’s an ingenious simplicity to his performance here, grounded as it is in compartmentalization. There’s a healthy ribbon of the same undercurrent of sullenness and hurt found in Phoenix’s turn as Commodus in his previous collaboration with Scott, Gladiator.
The actor also taps into Napoleon’s aching vulnerability (as well as the wall of guardedness built around it), and believably contrasts this with the certitude and forcefulness of his public-facing persona in a way that the script only hints at. There are also a couple very amusing moments—flashes of petulant anger and defensiveness—that run the risk of being co-opted by meme culture. Some might find these tonally jarring, but they are actually quite humanizing, deftly puncturing the precious bubble of prestige drama and showing the emotional fitfulness of someone whose comfort in his own skin exists only in moments either fleeting or extreme.
There isn’t a minute of Napoleon’s 158-minute running time that feels squandered (if anything, it palpably whets one’s appetite for Scott’s four-hour-plus cut, promised for streaming release later on Apple TV+). One either accepts the premise of a 48-year-old Phoenix portraying Napoleon from his twenties onward, or rejects it. One either yields to the narrative realities of what Scott’s fascinatingly engaging movie is, or clings tightly to stodgy preconceptions of exactly what laid track screen biopics should follow. Breathing rich life into a complicated bygone figure, Napoleon is a film that should only grow in esteem, likely sparking a devotion to equal its much-studied subject.
Napoleon opens in theaters November 22
103 Comments
That doesn’t sound like a positive to me, the clearly absent parts. Its weird that almost sounds like the film assumes a baseline level of knowledge but the people who actually have read and studied Napoleon viciously hate the film for some rather hysterical inaccuracies. I mean this is a movie where Napoleon leads a cavalry charge at Waterloo. Ummm, everyone from Marshal Nay to literally old Boney himself said he mostly sat out the battle due to his hemorrhoids. Oh I’m sorry I wasn’t there so I should go fuck myself so says the director.Anyway, I think doing a near cradle to grave story of Napoleon is foolhardy, trying to cover over 20 years of history in two hours 30 minutes is silly. It means either a lot of jumping around or a shallow pond overview. Its probably best to narrow the subject matter to a campaign or a few years. I mean hell the original Napoleon film, the 1927 silent film, that’s over 5 hours and its only childhood to 1797.But again, I’m not Ridley Scott. The genius visionary behind Alien… and 1492 Conquest of Paradise. The great director who doesn’t understand Blade Runner and once interjected that he likes Beavis and Butthead while arguing about Deckard is a Replicant. Clearly he is on another plane of existence, where primary sources aren’t real…
Scott certainly is an uneven director, but 1492 isn’t anywhere near his worst. It isn’t even that bad, although I know the idea of making a movie about Columbus as a flawed man rather than as a complete monster with no redeemable qualities wouldn’t fly today.
Honestly it was just the first movie off the top of my head that I remembered. He has such a long filmography list and I’d said a solid 60 percent is not great with a few occasional masterpieces here and there.
Have to agree, unfortunately. I just looked at his filmography: Thelma and louis, Alien, Blade Runner, The Duellists, Gladiator, Prometheus, The Last Duel, Gi Jane (I guess). All solid and some contemporary classics. But The Martian, The House of Gucci – awful. Robin Hood was plain awful and the rest I wouldn’t waste my time. It’ sunlikely that I’ll indulge in this one. But a guy’s got to pay rent :/
You mean like ignoring Haiti in your Napoleon story?
I keep this in my back pocket any time I have friends who think Napoleon was truly just a good man swept up in the times.
I know it’s vogue to label historical figures as psychopaths, and I’m not qualified to say that with certainty about Napoleon. But it is apparent that he just did not give a shit about other people. Dude came at the world like a game of Civilization, in which the goal was just to run everything, and human life wasn’t really a meaningful part of the equation. This probably didn’t stand out as much in his era, when imperialistic wars of aggression were de rigueur, but it’s hard to imagine the SCALE at which Napoleon would condemn huge numbers of people to a brutal death would have been as easy for most of his contemporaries. He wrote off all of Haiti without even going there in person, and when his flunkies couldn’t kill all the Haitians, his plan B was to just not talk about it again.Looking more broadly, the Napoleonic wars killed .6% of the world’s population. That is a quarter of a World War 2, just because one Corsican dude didn’t like the Austrians, and if he’d had the manpower to just genocide the non-white countries he didn’t like, it would have been way higher.
1950s Argentinians with odd accents “Of course we couldn’t make a Triumph of the Will today, we are only allowed to portray Hitler as a monster!” donald-glover-good.gif
I would be interested in your thoughts on how the experience matches or differs from your expectations after you see it.
I have family that are big big BIG Napoleon fans so probably this week. I know what I’m getting into but I will absolutely concede if I have fun.
Are you ok?
“Sat out the battle due to his hemorrhoids” – Don’t know if it was intentional but it made me laugh out loud.Also, I always love when you chime in on historical stuff. I learned so much about pirates from you!
“BRING ME LE IMPERIAL DONUT CUSHION!”
No not a joke actually. That really happened, Napoleon had some real health issues by Waterloo and he couldn’t ride a horse and at one point was semi incapacitated/sleeping which led to Marshal Nay having to take command which led to a disastrous cavalry charge against squared formations. Something Napoleon probably wouldn’t have ordered. So depicting him leading said charge is several layers of silly.
in the movie he’s basically just portrayed as ‘a bit sad’ and he definitely rides the hell out of a horse in that part.
I mean, I’d be sad if my ass were bleeding all over my nice white pants and my horse’s saddle and I still decided to lead a cavalry charge. So at least he got THAT emotion.
he’s sad before he rides the horse.
Jesus. Did Ridley Scott shag your dog and run over your mum or something?
He insulted the profession of historians so close enough. Saying yeah well you weren’t there so I can say whatever is maddening. Primary sources are people who were there. Yes there’s biases and issues but its not like we’re working with nothing. I come from a field far worse then the Napoleonic era filled with waaaay more myths and misconceptions and lacking in primary sources, yet I can still take educated guesses or at least say with confidence what happened. Basically I would have a sunnier disposition if Ridley Scott wasn’t acting like a teenager everytime someone politely points out details he got wrong on one of the most studied historical figures of all time.
You didn’t even mention the worst part: the movie gets the color of his shoelaces wrong! Old white men need to sit down and shut up and leave filmmaking to indiginous aborigonees.
I would have used House of Gucci or Prometheus as his worst work (still competent and even entertaining at times), instead of 1492, which has its flaws but in my opinion has been unjustly treated as the nadir of Scott’s career.
You will here no disagreements from me on his two Alien prequels they are pretty bad. House of Gucci is bad but I kinda love for the absolute camp it is. Jared Letos voice being replaced with a car horn? If the film knew how funny it was, it would maybe be actually good.
I am not sure how you could watch that movie without realizing it’s self aware…
Im going off every interview. Because Ridley Scott isn’t saying its intentional camp.
Leto, Pacino, Gaga, and Driver, all 4 are in complete different movies, at the same time, Driver being the only one that thinks he’s on a 100% serious drama. It’s extremely entertaining if for all the wrong reasons.
Well now I want to watch this movie.
Prometheus is ACTIVELY stupid. Very few movies have made me look around at my fellow audience members, expecting to see everyone else as completely shocked at the idiocy that was playing out on screen.People regarding that movie as anything other than barely passable still blows my mind.Yeah, it looks good. The cast is great. But the movie itself is just fucking terrible.(If a giant, crashing space ship is rolling towards you in a easily discernible, straight direction, just run away at a 90 degree angle and let it fall right past you… I let that shit bother me far more than it should’ve…)
For the most part, I think Ridley Scott should not confuse himself with a writer, because while he may be a great visual storyteller, he has never come across to me as a particularly deep or sophisticated when it comes to narrative, character, or theme. He’s got a bit of a jock mentality and really seems to become belligerently attached to some truly dumb ideas.
How do you enjoy any movie if you expect realism or accuracy? This post is like the goofy things Neil Degrasse Tyson posts on Twitter about how the stars aren’t accurate for that specific date.
Alternatively, perhaps Ridley Scott is giving the audience the benefit of the doubt to recognise the difference between an historical documentary and a film intended for entertainment based on historical events.
Ideally it would say “Based on a true story” like most Hollywood films do when they want to say the movie is only 1% to 10% true, but it’s reasonable to assume that the audience’s education is not an entertainment film maker’s responsibility.
Historians can probably rest assured that anyone with an actual interest will probably even be inspired by the inaccuracies to do
further research into what actually happened. There’s an essay or three in that for some high schoolers at least.
See, this line of argument annoys me. Because it assumes documentaries are objective. As someone who has made and is making documentaries, just like feature films, the quality is all the over the place. Even good ones get stuff wrong. I could be here all day pointing out where Ken Burns goes wrong from time to time.I’m also just hyper aware fiction shapes perception above all. Working as a pirate historian basically means being in the shadow of Pirates of the Caribbean and Treasure Island constantly and if a trope gets repeated enough, it’ll stick around for an ungodly long time. See Wagner putting horns on viking helmets.
Rather I think there’s a reasonable assumption documentaries are intended to inform and be educational, certainly more so than something intended to be entertainment. It’s the intention that matter here. Getting upset or blaming a director for just doing their job is ridiculous.
If you want historical accuracy, read biographies. This is a popcorn epic and if you’re going to be bothered that the film largely glosses over facts and/or blends them with mythology: skip it.
Jfc, this is an amazingly obnoxious and asinine comment….
What I want to know is if they show Joséphine’s bad teeth. Apparently (having grown up in the French Caribbean) her teeth were almost entirely rotten, a combination of eating a lot of sugar and the poor dental hygiene of the time.
Ok dude keep your fetish to yourself.
Of course they didn’t – because you know damn well every single Bridgerton-addled luvvie would be pumping out reams of click/ragebait for not portraying Josephine as looking like a fucking influencer.
Yes its… *checks notes* women who demand women in films subject themselves to the male gaze.
I’m also hoping they go into the entire mystery of Napoleon’s penis and where it wound up.No really. This is an actual thing.
She also had a bizarre habit of always reducing her age by a couple years when asked to write it down. She said something like I’m 27 when she had a kid who was 15. Quite a colorful woman.
An amazing woman, and incredibly revealing of Napolean that of all the women in his empire, she was the one he sought.
My mother does the same thing. Mom, stop telling people you’re thirty-six. I am your offspring and I am forty-five.
Yes and the movie will be in French.
I’ve enjoyed Scott’s work, and I like Phoenix quite a bit, but this one doesn’t interest me in the least. It just looks bloated and dull, and somehow Phoenix seems wrong for the part. But these are instincts, so maybe it’s brilliant. Oh well.
The first review I read is significantly different than this one: https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/napoleon-review-a-disturbed-and-disgusting-little-man-2388615/
I see what you did there. Dy-n0-MIIIIIIITE!
Too bad the Russian army these days is currently…occupied.
whose grasp extends back beyond CGIToo bad the one trailer I saw of Napoleon was plagued by the worst, laziest brand of it.
I have a sneaky suspicion he didn’t actually film at Austerliz going by the footage…
what is this comment supposed to mean? Look back at Scott’s OWN film The Duellists for an example of how real-world sets, practical effects, and human extras can be used to make a film look authentic. Bullshit CGI backdrops and digital extras are an embarassment to filmmaking.
Oh no I’m in complete agreement about cgi.
I don’t like CGI either but I’m sure it will be perfected to the point that we won’t be able to detect it.
It’s unlikely to happen with the movies we have right now, but one day I’d LOVE to see a movie depicting how we get a Napoleon-like person in power, rather than the ins and outs of the psyche of this one particular guy. It’s the same issue I have with The Crown – it’s not interesting because Elizabeth or Charles are inherently interesting people (they are really really not, no matter what Peter Morgan wants you to think), but it could be interesting to watch a show about them all the same because it’s such a lunatic institution and I’d love to see a drama about the how and why of the institution’s existence. But we don’t have good ways of depicting that kind of stuff in movies, really, so all we have are movies that try to make you invested in the particular person Napoleon was and thereby make you think world events happened because of his personality rather than through, you know, huge systemic issues and events. Like, Diana was not a fascinating individual per se – she just happened to be prettier than most people in the royal family and was surrounded by enough glamour during a particular decade, the 80s, when a number of issues collided to make her the icon she became.
I like to think that The Godfather accomplishes this, as it is less a character study of Michael Corleone the person, and more of a story about how the world that surrounds him eventually molds him into the person they want him to be, eventually putting him into power. Granted, he makes some crucial decisions that show his agency, but I’d say it’s more about the “world” than him as a person.
you can squint and say breaking bad is a similar arc about watching a guy become a power-hungry villain while still remaining a ‘hero’ in his own head.
The Wire kind of does it in TV.
RIP Stringer Bell
I think men like Napoleon happen because so many men feel some instinctual need to be important, recognized, followed, even worshipped. Basic narcissism combined with an urge to destroy things. Some find themselves in the right place at the right time and take the opportunity.Power.As far as the British royals are concerned, they literally believe that they are different from everyone else, that they were chosen to rule. They stay very close to the church. The kings and queens are the supreme governor and Defender of the Faith and they see themselves as essential to the life and health of the country. You could make a hundred movies and still not get inside of that psyche, I suspect. They’re just different. One reason they hated Diana is because she was capable of empathy. None of them are. And, for all of his posing, it’s doubtful that Harry has any either.
“And, for all of his posing, it’s doubtful that Harry has any either.” The most important thing I’ve learned from Trump et al. is that hypocrisy is much better than being loud-and-proud about your anti-democratic beliefs. So even if Harry’s empathy is an act is it still 1000x better than the aristocratic “superiority” shown by the royals and most of Britain’s ruling class.
I agree. He does appear more sympathetic and he probably does have some empathy because the damage done to him as a child had to have resulted in trauma and that can be a rough teacher. But I’m afraid I don’t understant this sentence: “The most important thing I’ve learned from Trump et al. is that hypocrisy is much better than being loud-and-proud about your anti-democratic beliefs.” My head’s a little overwhelmed today. Do you mean that hypocrisy is a more effective tactic or that, in some other way it is better? They’re both deplorable, of course.
I take what people write to heart and I’d like to better understand this
I mean that hypocrisy is often morally superior to honesty about your deplorable beliefs. In 2015 Trump began his campaign by calling immigrant men from Mexico rapists and since that time his open, explicit and enthusiastic racism has inspired many in the GOP to move from dog-whistle racism (a hypocritical stance since their beliefs and actions were still racist) to a more honest expression of racist ideas. Hypocritical, dog-whistle racism had the advantage of tacitly admitting that racism was bad, since it had to be masked and stated indirectly.
Gotcha. Thanks.
The real problem is that too few biopics are made by documentarians who actively hate the person they are depicting. People give Wolf of Wall Street a lot of justifiable grief for its sympathies toward the protagonist, and that’s still one of the most critical biopics in recent memory. Even Death of Stalin kind of makes you feel for Khrushchev, which you know, he probably didn’t deserve. If Hollywood made a movie about Chairman Mao they’d find a way to make collective urbanization look like a smart plan that just went wrong. I’m shocked someone hasn’t made a straight adaptation of Speer’s prison autobiography yet, presumably with a moody but loveable everyman like Chris Pine playing the role of a tortured genius misled by the vainglories of his rapid success.
saw this last night, didn’t really do much for me.every once in a while you get flashes of phoenix basically doing napoleon-as-tim-robinson-character, which is very funny, but it doesn’t give you much insight into the man, either as a military tactician or person. there are also lots of dangling plot threads that i assume get resolved in the at-home 4 hour version.much preferred the last two scott movies – the last duel had more to say about interpersonal relationships and house of gucci was more fun to watch.
I’m not even going to bother with this until I can see the full length version. The full length release of Kingdom of Heaven was a completely different movie than the theatrical one, which was an incoherent mess. It doesn’t sound like this suffers quite as badly as that, but they ask you to cut out a third of your movie, you’re probably losing some muscle with the fat.
Yep – sod this. Give me the 4 hour cut.
while i agree in general i also think you can accomplish a lot in 2 hours and 40 minutes haha.i am definitely looking forward to seeing the extendo version, though. hope it solves my problems.
I agree and I’d like to see more two hours or less movies. Brevity is an art in itself.
This is the first review I happened upon. It agrees with you, I think. I haven’t seen the movie, but the review, though short, reads as very insightful. https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/napoleon-review-a-disturbed-and-disgusting-little-man-2388615/ .
yeah i’m not quite as hard on it as the review but we largely came to the same conclusion and rating.
This has to be the most backhanded “positive” review I’ve read in ages. No character introductions – hope you know the history – oh wait we’re not really following that. No real focus on anything other than ‘greatest hits’ – but it’s good that they don’t bog this historic biopic down in the actual history! Phoenix stays in sulky pout mode – except a few wildly out there spots that “…run the risk of being co-opted by meme culture” because his performance is so wonderful.I mean, “One either accepts the premise of a 48-year-old Phoenix portraying Napoleon from his twenties onward, or rejects it.” I’ll take John C. Reilley doing it in Walk Hard because that was the entire point of making that particular type of decision into the butt of the joke. Two plus hours of the same unchanging face ‘aging’ through the years with limited bizarre ‘meme culture’ outbursts?Yeah. I get that someone paid for a positive review and all. Thank you for going out of the way to make sure the flaws were laid out.
Not everyone is obsessed with meaningless details like that. If it’s an entertaining movie I’ll enjoy it, I don’t care that Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t look like Napoleon.
How innacurate can a movie be before we stop calling it a biopic?
My bar for that is American Sniper. I don’t know if I’d say these two are on the same level, but a comparison isn’t unwarranted.
The difference with American Sniper is that it’s pretty well documented that Chief Kyle started rather exaggerating his accomplishments – which given his actual badassery he didn’t really need to do – while alive, so doing so even further after his death in film format wasn’t entirely inappropriate.Whether or not Napoleon qualifies as a biopic or not, got me.
I mean, is Amadeus a biopic?
It is a masterpiece, not accurate as a history movie, AAA+ as a piece of cinema.
I adore that film despite its many problems; can’t count how many times I’ve seen it.
Same here! No less than 8 times in my case.
This is exactly the kind of title I reach for when I poo poo the term “biopic”.
Depends if accuracy is a required aspect of the biopic.
Fair to say if it’s a documentary biopic, then it should be accurate. But if it’s a biopic intended for entertainment, then fair to say don’t expect a peer reviewed academic thesis.
When I see the word “biopic” I expect none.
Leslie Nielsen all but said his autobiography was full of things that didn’t happen and it was awesome!I heard similar things (and good things) about the Weird Al Yankovic film of his life.
Is this scene in the movie?“My spies tell me that my illustrious British enemy is working on a new meat recipe which he plans to call Beef Wellington. It will never get off the ground. We must develop the Napoleon before he develops Beef Wellington. The future of Europe hangs in the balance.”
This that Captain Crunch movie everyone keeps talking about?
I’ll probably see this someday, but to me, this is peak cinematic Napoleon:
He also enjoyed San Dimas’ waterpark, Waterloo. Although you’d think the name would have unpleasant connotations for him.
“Joaquin I’m sorry you couldn’t be with us tonight”David Letterman
Does this cover when he received the coveted “Ziggy Piggy” award?
Is “actually Napoleon wasn’t short” the history nerd equivalent to “Frankenstien was the name of the scientist”
Or “actually, Einstein didn’t fail math”.
But isn’t the monster last name frankenstein since he was created by victor
How about we reverse the game:“Napoleon was short” and “Frankenstein was the monster’s name” are litmus tests into people’s general stupidity.
Since it’s the main thing people think they know about him, and it nullifies everything about the Napoleon Complex that they think motivated him, I think it’s a myth worthy of busting.It’s like saying “Everybody knew the Earth was round for pretty much forever, and Ancient Greeks even calculated its circumference” when somebody tries to tell you Columbus was a misunderstood genius who was the only one who knew that.“Frankenstien (sic) was the name of the scientist” is trivial in comparison.
I would say the historical equivalent is vikings didn’t have horned helmets. I’m a historian, not a Viking Age historian mind you so I’m not dealing with people saying this. But it is kinda snobby to just randomly tell people this.
vikings didn’t have horned helmets.WHAT?!?!!
I hope that this is not as tedious as Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great film.
Napoleon didn’t speak in an American accent. He spoke French. Pheonix couldn’t even bother to do an French English accent. It takes me out of the movie. Heck, Napoleon in Bill and Ted is a better more accurate portrayl of the real Napoleon.
I read a less congratulatroy review that wasn’t impressed with the battle scenes.Why do people like battle scenes so much anyway? Idk, maybe Scott felt beholden to the three million soldiers who died. The reviewer suggested that the movie is something of a self-portrait.
“Why do people like battle scenes so much anyway?”While I’m sure you can come up with a few possible reasons on your own why people might like spectacular depictions of warfare in escapist cinema, David Sims’ review in The Atlantic touches a bit on why Scott’s particularly good at these sorts of things.
Is this going to be like the Apple+ “release” of the Midsommar director’s cut where it’s only for sale and the theatrical version is free?
This is the first positive review I’ve read. Everyone else has been scathing. Interesting.