'Napoleon' briefing

2 (out of 4)

            Ridley Scott is 86 years old; this fact alone should outweigh the household name and imposing legacy, but hopefully Napoleon is proof enough for studios to stop handing him massive sums to produce such extravagant waste. The last man standing as far as grand-scale historical epics are concerned has rarely made it so clear he’s in need of a new outlet, and no I don’t mean Alien prequel sequels — at least 2024’s Romulus is under the command of someone else (though now, technically and treacherously, under the Disney umbrella). The Last Duel was a box office bum just coming out of COVID’s grip in late 2021, but it was one of his stronger affairs with the long past — his 1977 debut The Duellists is like an epic in miniature, and also his only other film set in the Napoleonic era, doubtless one of his best still, with an impeccably annoying Harvey Keitel keeping you on your toes.

Outside of more recent, mostly biographical history in films like the horrendous crime against Italians that was House of Gucci, All the Money in the World’s Spielbergian sense of spinning something cinematic out of the unfilmable (though writer David Scarpa has hardly culled cinema out of ol' Boney, one of history’s most legendary backstories, so let us just see about Gladiator II), America Gangster’s bristling, terse stroke of crime cinema or the Bay-esque shrapnel of Black Hawk Down’s punishing survival war thriller, there’s only the capable Christopher Columbus feature 1492: Conquest of Paradise before the 21st century would see Scott’s five takes from further back — the good includes Gladiator's overestimated greatness and the aforementioned The Last Duel, meanwhile Kingdom of Heaven and Exodus: Gods and Kings, for all their minor crimes against the Almighty, are meaty, ambitious, heightened cinema and hell, even his insufferably serious Robin Hood had more identifiable visceral fortitude than 2023’s Napoleon. Run-ons aside, he really is like Ron Howard, constantly doubling up, bouncing from hit to failure, lowbrow to Oscar bait. Akin to a second-rate Spielberg, Scott is also a real genre schizo who can handle several spinning plates of film production and, in this particular case, I feel like the Paul Mescal-led Gladiator follow-up (due in one year’s time) has the larger share of his attention.

So you’ve got a filmmaker who could barely match up to the genre’s last full, sincere efforts — Oliver Stone’s underrated Alexander and Wolfgang Petersen’s testy, tremendously entertaining Troy, both from 2004 while Scott was cooking up the lesser Kingdom of Heaven (by theatrical standards) — in tandem with one of the best working actors pretty plainly phoning it in, even in spite of the producer credit. Even worse for relative talent, Phoenix turned in a tenfold more committed, interesting, lasting showcase in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid just this year. Probably not since Tom Cruise was supposed to be a one-eyed German in Valkyrie has a lead performance come off so plainly as actor in auto-pilot, with Joaquin turning in so-called efforts making his unsubtle sliminess in the original Gladiator look meek and mild. Some of Phoenix’s improvised takes are pedestrian, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do worse.

All this for, in theory and not to downplay the untapped ground, the film project Stanley Kubrick once deemed would be “the greatest movie ever made.” As is legend, following the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick went hard on pre-production for a Napoleon epic with loads of research, an intended Jack Nicholson performance and a finished script long since available to read, which Spielberg and HBO are at work translating into a miniseries not too far away. Unfortunately financing was pulled after the failure of the Italian/Soviet production of 1970’s Waterloo, a fairly consummate, slimmer spectacle famous for featuring the most extras ever put to film before or since, with stunningly accurate simulations of Bonaparte’s last battle, sandwiched between exiles. I’ll have to see what Stanley thought of that film, but he was not a fan of the recent Russian War and Peace, and was also quite critical of what many consider to be a paragon of early film technique, 1927 exactly, Abel Gance’s deeply French, languidly storied, sometimes ravishingly composed and committed five-hour-plus rendering of the first few epochs of Napoleon’s greatly discussed, astounding ascension. Kubrick, admitting the technical significance (the tinted images, swooping camera movements, blitzing editing and its futuristic, one-of-a-kind triptych tableaux finale keep it one for the books), would call the performances crude and other than those playing Napoleon as child (Edmond Van Daële) and adult (Albert Diudonnée) I can’t help but agree. Gance planned on making many more movies, and the historic scope Scott tries to cover here could’ve made it 10 hours in Abel’s perfect world.

Needless to say, seeing as so surprisingly little has been made about him, Bonaparte's absence from media continually deepens a crater in historical cinema, a man whose storied-and-then-some life is supposedly ripe for feats of audiovisual inscription! This knowledge alone, let’s just forget that this is the closest thing we’ll get for some time to THE great film Kubrick had up his sleeve (probably because HE was at the helm), renders 2023’s Napoleon a crushing blow, despite Scott’s general aptitude for kinetic battle sequences and the patient, presumably anachronistic drama in between. I can’t be mad that the usual hard-R sex and violence now just makes me think of History Channel by way of Game of Thrones, as that’s always kinda been Scott’s thing in this particular arena and a dubious distinction of big 21st century epics. He may look to David Lean as a model but clearly from only so many vantages, in the same quote he says says this in regard to not letting epic qualities crowd character, because here it’s as if there were no figures in this period that mattered at all save for Nap and his lady.

Maybe, if you really did something exquisitely emotional, tender and psychologically challenging, I or some actual history nerd could forgive all the political/military history/intrigue ignored for the sake of pathos. So despite Vanessa Kirby’s best efforts, her and Phoenix as siphons of this second-rate script cannot shape the warmest part of the cold, sullen artillery ace to anything traditionally satisfying. Let’s not show his trials, just how their life was shaded by vag — you know there are more to people than their relationships? The film has no time for other figures big and small in the political area, which is wasteful considering Napoleon had a host of enemies.

Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you use love to redeem out titular emperor considering this movie also wants so desperately to paint Bonaparte as an unhinged toddler, like some carnival corner-guy's caricature of Trump. Hey I’m not French, and obviously this wasn’t as Frog-friendly as the 96-year-old homeland early-days epic all about the come-up and FRANCE, but considering Scott is English this is just plain RACIST! Even as a layman I know there’s more to one of the most talked about people ever than this shit — his short king charisma had to be real and you see none of that here because the narrative forgoes just about all of his development, and I would take a younger, radical actor at least for Act One instead of Phoenix in this case, even Timothée Chalamet for Christ’s sake.

Then there’s all the weird humor and the tough task it becomes to differentiate between intended and not. “You think you’re so great because you have BOATS!” Is this supposed to feel like some ZAZ movie outside of the battles? As a pivotal revolutionary figure in any respect, there’s just something so empty about the scripting, so diluted in the grim photography (also a 21st century thing, also which Scott only helped normalize), so workmanlike about the acting, so cheap about this expensive Apple TV+ movie (regardless of ILM) and so cynical in its inaccuracies — even the primary poster has him cavalry charging, something the cannon commander really didn’t do. Blowing up the pyramids that the real Napoleon had more humbled respect for is the last and most prominent of the many sad, blatant inconsistencies at play. Master and Commander eats this shit for breakfast and Kubrick’s Napoleonic-era sub-in Barry Lyndon even moreso, that and probably any other film I referenced in this review.

“Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.” — Ridley Scott

You know what? I’ll just drop the subject.