After the screening of this movie, another critic asked me what I thought. I said I didn’t care for it, and he started trying to make a case for why it was good. The first thing he said was, “Those battle scenes were amazing.”
I responded, “Yes, they were. Ridley Scott can do action sequences well, but I wanted more from this movie than good war scenes.”
When I got in my car to drive home, I heard the new song “Angry” by The Rolling Stones. It made me think of a way to compare the two. When a classic band releases a new song and someone asks what you think, it’s not hard to say, “I liked it.” That’s because it only took four minutes out of your life to listen to. You recognize Mick Jagger’s voice (it’s hard to believe he’s 80), you hear a bit of Keith Richards, but if you really think about it…you don’t care much for the song. You have no desire to ever hear it again, the way you’ve heard “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” a thousand times, and the next time it comes on the radio, you’ll turn it up and enjoy listening to it again.
And I’m not saying for a movie to be good, you have to want to watch it over and over. I’ve loved many films I’ve only seen once, and had no desire to ever see again. But this movie is over two and a half hours long. That’s asking a lot from audiences when there’s so much missing.
And if a great battle scene is all someone needs to deem this a good movie, so be it. I’d at least like to hear a classic line or command. General Patton had quotes like: “May God have mercy on my enemies, because I won’t.” He also said “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way!”
I can only think of a few quotes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “A Soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” There’s “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
When I asked my wife if there was another, she gave me: “Imagination governs the world.”
And which of those did we hear in this movie? I don’t recall any being uttered, but did hear him sternly say at the table, “Destiny has brought me…this lamb chop!”
Another scene has him whining to a British officer, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!”
When it comes to the long love of his life, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), she is sitting at the table with him and spreads her legs a bit and says, “If you look down, you’ll see a surprise. And once you’ve seen it, you’ll always want it.”
Joaquin Phoenix, as Napoleon, just sits there with a dopey look on his face. There is absolutely no chemistry between these two, and nothing that shows us why they carried on for so long. In fact, we needed a lot more insight into the motivations of these characters. I’m not sure what Ridley Scott wanted to tell us about Napoleon. That he pouts and scowls and gets angry? He is one of the figures in European history that has had multiple stories done about. Hell, there’s a complex named after him. But we learn that he just bends Josephine over a table and goes to town. And when he’s not in town, she has other lovers come over. Yikes. After seeing how Marie Antoinette was decapitated, I wouldn’t have risked having an affair with her (side note: when she was beheaded, her hair was actually cut off, and Napoleon wasn’t there watching it; I’m guessing there were other inaccuracies, but I didn’t pay as much attention in my high school history classes as I should have).
Phoenix seems to be playing the same character he played in “The Joker” and a number of other roles. It’s interesting though, that his face does look like Napoleon to me (and you throw on that huge pointy hat and…this works better than Bradley Cooper throwing on a big nose, but that’s a line for a future review).
It’s unfortunate that actors like Kirby, Rupert Everett, and Paul Rhys have lines David Scarpa (All the Money in the World) wrote.
Napoleon’s rise from an artillery commander to emperor seems to happen rather quickly. Scott was smart to not just make it one battle after another, so we see scenes of the relationship in between (and those are some vicious battles, too).
The scenery is shot nicely, and the fight sequences are exquisite. Some are shot from overhead, in an interesting way. The soldiers charging each other, we’ve seen before, but it’s always so powerful and brutal to see, imagining how war was once fought this way (with a drummer and fife, too).
I would have preferred a more interesting character study, to find out what really made this military tactician tick.
So, to answer that original critic, at the start of this review, as to how good the battle scenes are; well, that’s why I’m giving it any stars at all. I’ve had people say before, “You really knocked the movie so much in your review, but you still give it a few stars. Why?”
Well, if there were certain elements that were good, it deserves more than a zero. That being said, this gets 2 stars out of 5. And be warned, when it comes out on Apple TV+, it’s going to be the four hour version.