Posted on 12/13/2023 2:59:32 PM PST by Fiji Hill
Rising above the 7th Arrondissement of Paris is the gold dome of Les Invalides, a landmark that serves as both a French military museum and the final resting place of the nation’s greatest general, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The engravings surrounding his sarcophagus depict him as one of the ancients, adorned with laurels and togas next to tablets listing his vast accomplishments.
Napoleon’s legacy as both a military mastermind and a statesman is hard to summarize — and complicated to assess. Similarly, there’s just too much to the man to capture in a single film.
Still, the tagline of celebrated director Ridley Scott’s new “Napoleon” — released in theaters Nov. 22 — promises an ambitious attempt: “He came from nothing. He conquered everything.”
For better or worse, those words are where the film’s respect for Napoleon ends.
There is nothing of Napoleon’s rise from obscurity in Corsica to the top of the French Republic, nor mention of his early military victories. The years that he spent building the charisma and political capital to seize power as First Consul and eventually as the self-crowned emperor go unnoticed. Viewing “Napoleon” in a vacuum, one might wonder: How did France become an empire? And who even is this guy?
Instead, the Napoleon introduced to viewers (played by Joaquin Phoenix) is reduced to a simp for his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and, frankly, a bore.
The historical Napoleon is remembered for his energy, inquisitiveness, charm, and ability to micromanage the French Empire. But Scott’s Napoleon spends much of his screen time sitting forlornly on couches or behaving depravedly with Josephine, rather than leading his men in the throes of battle or engaging in geopolitical power plays with Russia, Austria, the Vatican, and his notorious adversary, Britain.
The director seems more inclined to show Phoenix’s Napoleon sleeping (for comedic effect) than doing anything interesting with his troops (apart from him passing out bread to several soldiers during the doomed Moscow campaign).
Scott’s strange inversions don’t stop there. While Napoleon has long been portrayed as a little man in stature (although in reality, he was average height for his day) but a big one in thought, will, and power, the on-screen version is the opposite.
After being told of Josephine’s affair while in Egypt, Napoleon returns to France to ragefully confront his wife. As a command, he warns that she is nothing without him. But it is a threat with no foundation, for this position of power is quickly reversed in the next scene with Josephine repeating the same words.
Josephine, we are made to understand, was truly the master of the relationship, while Napoleon was nothing more than a whimpering cuckold. It’s a notion that seems to drive the whole film: Napoleon was not really in command (this is even demonstrated when his cold, demanding mother convinces her sheepish son to have relations with a young woman to breed an heir for the empire).
By elevating Josephine as his prime motivation in several major events (including inaccurately suggesting she was the reason he left Elba during his first exile), Scott’s Napoleon is merely an angsty, boyish man.
His military maxims — ones that are still studied today — are also spurned. Beyond his strategizing for Waterloo, his greatest and last defeat that led to his second exile, Napoleon’s tact briefly shines forth during the Battle of Austerlitz, arguably his greatest victory; while cinematic, even Scott’s Austerlitz sequence rings hollow because it disregards the historical truth (and the French Army’s battleplan) for the myth — that thousands died as Napoleon’s artillery fired at the ice underneath the retreating Austrian and Russian troops.
In truth, only a dozen bodies have been found. But the myth masks the traps Napoleon laid; even in his greatest victory, the general cannot “win the day” in Scott’s “Napoleon.” Napoleon’s war victories — the most of any leader in history — are all enshrined on the tablets in Les Invalides but omitted in the film.
Scott seems uninterested in compensating for such omissions with other aspects of history. For example: The French Revolution and the Enlightenment, two other historical realities that are crucial to understanding what “made” Napoleon, appear nowhere in the movie.
Ultimately, his love and friendship with Josephine are not enough to present “Napoleon’s” portrait of its main subject as flesh and blood.
Les Invalides’ monuments are not flesh and blood either, but they convey a sense of the man’s standing in history. But “Napoleon” leaves us wondering why this man is even worth remembering at all. The film does not wrestle with his legacy, criticize his mythic stature, or explore what made him tick beyond sexual desires and dynastic aspirations. There is only one moment on St. Helena when the famed general — who, at this point, has lost everything he loved, including Josephine — purports a false narrative of himself that is easily debunked by two young girls.
The scene, however, is not enough to counter Napoleon’s self-aggrandizement and mitigating responsibility for blunders in his memoirs (which the film also fails to portray). “Napoleon” shortchanges its protagonist in too many respects to the point where the film’s tagline is meaningless, baseless like the character’s command to his wife. By the end, the viewer does not know where he came from, what he conquered, and how he should be regarded today.
The lifeless and hollow Napoleon of Scott’s film would be unworthy of a shrine in Paris that more than 1 million tourists visit per year — or, perhaps, even a movie more than 200 years after his death.
I’ll wait for it on the boob tube, i can pause for potty breaks.
Seems like a bore.
I’m going to wait to see it on my feeds. Flintlock battles and cavalry may be worth sitting for three hours.
I’ve heard Scott cut like an hour and a half for the theatrical release, that will be added back in for the streaming release.
So maybe it will get better with the cuts added back in. Maybe not. Ridley Scott’s batting average ain’t great lately.
It also portrays the myth of him shooting a canon at the nose of the Sphinx, rather than the reality of him bringing a small army of 160 scientists, historians, artists, writers and archeologists to Egypt to carefully document and study the place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_de_l%27%C3%89gypte
They produced a fine 37 volume book of Egypt. The illustrations are still commonly used to this day.
But the myth is that he shot the nose off the Sphinx.
It seems to be a fun action movie.
Nothing to do with history though. But I don’t think that was the intention to begin with anyway.
Just a fun action movie.
I read that article a few days ago and decided the film is not worth seeing. Instead, I ordered a DVD of a documentary on him from the library. Probably not as exciting as a film but certainly more informative.
>> But the myth is that he shot the nose off the Sphinx.
Movie ping.
Still got your nose, sphinx?
He also destroyed Alien
I do not understand why Napoleon was not played by a black gay woman with a lice haircut.
It also portrays the myth of him shooting a canon at the nose of the Sphinx,
—
The Sphinx’s nose was hacked off before Napoleon was born by a fanatic muslim.
All these directors should have retired 20 years ago. Now woke infects everything they do and turns it into crap.
Not only that, the pathological lying of Hollywood renders nearly all historically based films fatally flawed as soon as the script is written.
They take truly interesting history and invert it into whatever utterly predictable trope that is currently trending.
In the end, he was a loser.
Little men have a problem making credible movies of, or acting as, or writing for, the big men of the past.
Even the good actors come off as a little light for the hard men they are portraying in a lot of movies.
We saw this film during it’s opening weekend. Ugh. They turned Napoleon into a total cuck. The trailers I saw were all about the battle scenes, but there was much less of that in the actual movie and way too much Josephine. And, of course, they had to add token blacks. If I were watching a movie set in the past in an African village, I would not expect to see whites so why they do this in reverse is total woke nonsense. I loved Gladiator but Napoleon is definitely not one of Scott’s best films.
I saw this movie about a week ago. It was dull, confusing, and full of things that a person would normally want to leave out of his life’s story.
I saw it. At the conclusion my wife and I said, meh. Large portions of the movie were dull. Phoenix’s portrayal of Napoleon was small. Like Nappy was just another guy. Josephine was not hot enough to invoke all the passion. Nappy could have done better.
Wait until it comes to CATV streaming, for a ‘pause’, whiz-break and a fresh, cold brewski.
The scientists scene is there, with a bunch of archaeologists. Maybe there too long, as there is a 1:1 with a mummy that is a bit pointless. Maybe making a “sic transit gloria mundi” point.
And its not shooting at the Sphinx, but a pyramid. Wrong also, of course.
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