C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas Napoléon

Having seen the shorts and one interview I was keen to see Ridley Scott's Napoleon.  I have very fond memories of The Duelists.  I read one very good review, but then there came a stream of rather negative reviews, so my expectations were not high.

I was both impressed and disappointed by the movie.

On reflection it is ridiculous to think that the span of 20 plus years of turbulent history can be rendered in two and a half hours.  To accomplish this too many liberties had to be taken and that spoilt it for those of us with some knowledge of the subject.  

Napoleon's military greatness was based on strategy and operational manoeuvrer.  Watching the film it is reduced to various tactical ploys that just didn't happen. A great pity as a lot of effort had gone into the battle scenes which were magnificent, but not Napoleon.  

The romance between Napoleon and Josephine was a key part of the movie and I think it would have been better to concentrate on that and make the war aspects into a separate companion movie which would have been innovative.  In fact the whole thing should have been more structured like Game of Thrones to cover the full breadth of the historical subject.  I would be interested to know how the budgets compared.  Of course doing it in that format maybe entertainment, but it is not necessarily art.

More interesting still in these modern times would have been to have Josephine played by an actor of colour which would be perfectly in keeping with English propaganda of the time.

Joachim Phoenix's portrayal of Napoleon was mixed.  In fact if that was all you had to go on you would be wondering why Napoleon is such a great historical figure.  A real negative for me, and I am a confessed Bonapartist, was how they made Napoleon appear Trump like.  Yuck!  

They went to all the trouble to set up the Egyptian campaign and after a few minutes must have come to some decision about what to do now and some bright spark said "let's fire on the Pyramids".  Obviously he had read the chapter headings in his research and noted the "Battle of the Pyramids" and took it literally!  Again, magnificent cinematography, but not Napoleon.  And as to the the bit with the mummy, wtf?  Egyptology was a major trend in those times, but I don't think that was the right way to portray it.

The scale was grand and I thought the coronation scene was particularly impressive, although I understand the sequence might have been a bit different, but that's what you get when you condense 20 years of history into 180 minutes of entertainment.  Pity.

Not a patch on Waterloo or Rod Steiger's Napoleon which brought true gravitas to the man who was involved in so much killing.  Why they had to list all the deaths at the end I am not sure.  Napoleon wasn't always the aggressor and it was more the aristocrats of Europe not wanting the foundation of their political systems threatened by an alternative.  While it was imperial splendor that Napoleon created, he did so to deal with his contemporaries who other wise wouldn't engage with a republic.  That was something I got from the movie and maybe true. It then of course generated the need for an heir and all the trouble that caused.

I was really irked by the chap playing Wellington, not a patch on Christopher Plummer.  I wonder if the people involved in this movie watched Waterloo?

All the same, looking forward to taking my partner to see it and find out what she makes of it all.

Best part was I found a really good Japanese restaurant near the theatre complex.