Napoleon

Rimmer may have traveled through Europe with the greatest general of all time and mowed down Belgians, but I suspect fraud in the movie theater admission fee that I decided to sacrifice despite the poor reviews. Visually, Scott still has it at eighty-six, and I caught myself thinking about who will shoot this once Ridley is gone. But there were more and more similar mental escapes from the movie, mostly into history class, where I struggled in vain to remember the reasons why defenders of the republic suddenly ended up with a royal crown on their heads, or when one dinner and one letter were enough to return from the Elba. The battles drew me in like nothing else. Damn the historical accuracy, because when the ice cracks at Slavkov, you go underwater with the stuntmen, while at Waterloo, you feel total despair and devastation that makes you physically sick. But instead of more military campaigns, and more of Napoleon's egoistically maniacal journey that tore Europe apart, we get completely senseless flirting with Josephine, and summarizing their relationship in letters would save screening time in favor of the aforementioned. The promised four-hour stream leaves me cold, partly because it's a deception against the viewer, and also because I probably don't have the strength to watch the cringe-worthy relationship of two people where one is enticed to sex by horny neighing while the other complains about freshly styled hair. (11/12/2023)

The cinematic cut turned out as it probably had to: as an obviously incomplete fragment of a larger work. It's hard to rate it, it's like reading a novel and skipping every ten pages. What is in the cinema cut is fine, but it doesn't coalesce into a comprehensive experience. Napoleon's personal life is there, the battles are there, but the "politics" between them are missing, so you don't really know why any given battle is happening. Quite absurdly, from the cinematic cut, the character of Napoleon doesn't actually strike me as an active instigator of all this wartime fury, nor as a figure that the rest of Europe feared. (23/11/2023)

Short. Scott's a stud, but he might as well have made Napoleon a trilogy instead of skipping through his life like a rushed history lesson. Phoenix is great, his Napoleon oscillates between aspiring strategist and lovelorn naif. But Kirby doesn't have enough space, so she comes across as weird. The leap from infatuation to divorce is very rushed. The battles, Toulon, Austerlitz and Waterloo, are exquisite, though. There's black humour, poking fun at politicians and their lies. Also, that brute force and tactics are above all, but are useless when it rains. P.S.: Almost on the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz. (03/12/2023)

Basically, Napoleon has everything I was looking forward to, but it's always too short. The film jumps from scene to scene for two and a half hours, but gives little space to make an impact. Phoenix's Napoleon is the same (or rather, just as unpleasant) from beginning to end and doesn't surprise in like Vanessa Kirby's Josephine. The other characters are unfortunately stale, however interesting they could have been – Napoleon's brother and their mother, Josephine's lover, Wellington... I believe that in the long version they will be given their due space, but I would also like to see those promised spectacular battles get their due space, because we didn't get much of those either. What I wouldn't give for the whole film to take place during the Egyptian campaign, for example! But no, we're here for a while, there's no time for a tactical demonstration, the scenes need subtitles with years so they don't blend in. Ridley Scott doesn't really show his hand until the end, at Waterloo, where I got everything I wanted, but I'm not going to lie when I say I was already wishing for the film to end about half an hour before that. I'm sorry, but I rate it as I rate it. If you want to see a really good cinematic Napoleon, check out Bondarchuk's masterpiece, the Czech Waterloo with Rudolf Hrušínský if you're in the mood for a TV psychological treat. And if you want to see a long film about a controversial warlord who deserves every minute of its runtime, Patton is for you. (25/11/2023)

The quality of the material is undeniable, although (so far) rather tentative. The strangest edited film in a long time. One thing is that it's abridged to the point of shame, that even a layman feels that whole long passages are missing. Another thing is that even in the scenes that did make it into the theatrical cut, it's often obvious that those are also significantly cut; there's no continuity of shots, dialogue, logic, sequence. I have no doubt that when it is in its final, considerably longer form, it will be a very much improved and coherent experience that, while not historically faithful, will be spectacular in the best sense of the word. So far, however, these are merely impressive scenes with shoddy characterisation; more a feature length trailer than a film. (14/06/2024)