Photo via Sony Pictures
6/10
The extent I understand French history begins and ends with Assassin’s Creed Unity. Luckily, historical accuracy is best left in the hands of Wired fact-checkers on YouTube.
“Napoleon” is a 2023 historical war epic from Ridley Scott, the same director behind “Gladiator” and “Black Hawk Down.” The war genre is no stranger to Scott, but his exploration of Napoleon’s life comes across as confused and disjointed. It reigns as a war film, flops as a romance, and is too much of both to keep things straight.
The film opens at the end of The French Revolution, during the execution of Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France. Gore is a common feature of this film, and the guillotine is a powerful symbol to begin with. You can tell the next two-and-a-half hours will have you wincing.
From here, we roll straight into Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at Toulon, his first battle as part of France’s First Republic. Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon as a stuttering nerd, muttering to himself his plan of action as it plays out onscreen. His attempt to lead the charge on the British fort is immediately cut short when his horse is obliterated by a cannon shot and collapses in agony.
Despite his shock and shambling around the fight, Napoleon seizes the fort, destroys the blockade and proves himself a successful field commander. Following this, he pulls the cannonball out of his horse as a gift for his mother – it’s clear we’re watching a strange little man.
Napoleon’s timidness grows into detachment and indifference. As self-appointed emperor, he becomes more concerned with his legacy than with the lives of his men. Over time, Napoleon demonstrates his willingness – almost satisfaction – at throwing bodies into the line of fire. The film’s credits are eager to share that nearly 3 million of his soldiers died during his career.
Strangely, Napoleon’s soldiers remained fiercely loyal to him, even returning to his command after his initial exile from France. It’s never clear why they care so much for him, other than his past victories. Even so, those victories led to immense loss of life. The movie made clear that war is an ultimately pointless, undignified endeavor. However, it never shows the effect, if any, that loss of life had on Napoleon and his men.
There’s no doubt the war aspects of this film are some of its best, due in large part to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. Battlefields range from verdant and wide to frozen and choked, while political scenes set in Paris are palatial and calming. The world of “Napoleon” is dirty and war-torn, as if a Neoclassical painting had jumped from canvas to screen.
Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine Bonaparte is a major part of Napoleon’s life, and certainly a forceful presence in the film, but their relationship is handled clumsily. No matter how volatile their real-life relationship was, the film’s portrayal made for poor scenes and painfully long sequences.
Napoleon is a dork, so his “advances” toward Joséphine are slack-jawed and dead-eyed. History demands they get married, so despite his charmlessness, Joséphine giggles all the way to the chapel. This goes on for a frustratingly long amount of time. If you didn’t know anything about this movie before going in, you might have thought it was a historical romance for the first half hour.
Later during his campaign in Egypt, Napoleon hears Joséphine is having an affair. He abandons his troops and immediately sails for France to confront her. Though he’s livid, he admits in the next scene that he’s had multiple affairs. The cut to this is sudden and laughable. What movie did these affairs happen in? Because it wasn’t this one.
Eventually, Joséphine and Napoleon divorce because she can’t have kids. He soon marries the Austrian emperor’s daughter, Marie Louise. We see her once, as she and Napoleon first meet, but never again. She lived throughout the remainder of Napoleon’s life, but not the remainder of this movie. She apparently had no opinions of Napoleon being exiled twice or having a son together.
This film marks the sixth release this year for Apple Studios, which develops content for their own streaming platform. Screenwriter David Scarpa comes from “The Man in the High Tower,” a television series on Amazon Prime Video. Despite being released in theaters, the long-term plan is for a streaming release. Though there are flashy visuals and big names, it ultimately comes across as many streaming films do – here forever, gone tomorrow.
“Napoleon” is ambitious and visually stunning, but struggles to balance the epic scale of war with the romantic aspects of one man’s life. It’s clear that Napoleon’s final words, “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine,” were the guiding themes of the film, but couldn’t be put together in a way that leaves viewers satisfied.
SZNS MAG 