Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” Is Worse Than You Think

Napoleon has been out for a while but I finally saw it, and even negative reviews were overly generous. The uninspired CGI slop in Napoleon is what I call “content,” in the same sense as AI-generated copy on a clickbait website. Have you seen the trailer? If so, you’ve seen the whole movie because there wasn’t anything else in it.

When I saw the trailer for the first time, there were all of the usual red flags, but I was particularly concerned by the dialogue between Napoleon and Josephine:

What is this costume you have on?

This is my uniform. I led the French victory at Toulon.

It doesn’t make any sense for Josephine to not recognize a military uniform, especially as an officer’s wife. I think the only reason for her saying this was because the writers thought it would be funny, and being funny is more important than making sense. It also doesn’t make any sense for Napoleon to respond that he led the French victory at Toulon. Who else would he have led the victory for, it was stupid exposition. What’s worse is that by this point in the movie the audience would already know who Napoleon is and already seen the battle at Toulon. This means that the only reason he specified the “French” victory was so his line would have historical context in the trailer. It’s a very bad sign when a script is written to sound good in the trailer rather than the movie itself.

The movie overall feels like it was a smear piece written by someone who didn’t like him, perhaps the British. Joaquin Phoenix was simply too old for the part, as Napoleon was 24 at Tulan, literally half Phoenix’s age, and still younger than him the day he died. Phoenix has played an emperor before in Gladiator, but didn’t take any of that energy with him into Napoleon. He looks tired and bored all the time, even in his most triumphant personal victories. It would have actually been good character development to show Napoleon as exhausted and sickly in his later years, like in the retreat from Russia or perhaps Waterloo, but he was like that to begin with.

Another related problem is that the movie does “tell not show.” Napoleon repeatedly says all of the things he supposedly likes and wants, but there’s no proof of it in his actions. Napoleon says he loves Josephine, but always looks like he’s about to fall asleep on top of her. He looks equally bored in all of his victories, so it’s unclear why he is even bothering to do something that he clearly doesn’t enjoy at all. Why should the audience be more excited about something than the main character himself?

Josephine has an absurdly inflated role in the part, much like Chani in Dune, and it doesn’t help that she always looks just as bored and sleepy as him. Most of their conversations take place while lounging on a couch. Their lines might read okay on paper but are delivered in a bored, sleepy monotone. Like Napoleon and Josephine smoked weed all evening and are rambling nonsense to each other as they doze off. These conversations are also really circular and repetitive (like how stoned people talk), I’m fairly sure almost all of the Napoleon-Josephine dialogue could have been condensed to two, maybe three short conversations and that would have freed up a lot of screen time for something more interesting.

The way Napoleon is depicted as orbiting Planet Josephine makes him look like an NPC, which would be fine if he was a plumber or a typist, but not as one of the most famous military geniuses and dictators in history. The movie had a lot of off-screen narration, framed as Napoleon’s letters to Josephine, but it just makes him sound like an NPC. The central figure in Napoleon’s life should be Napoleon. Narration would actually be okay, but should have been framed as a constant internal monologue addressed to himself. I think it’s funny that Phoenix’s Joker is a better Napoleon than Napoleon, at least in the sense that he’s the main character in the movie pursuing his own gratification.

Napoleon is a very long movie without a coherent structure of a beginning, middle, and end. It just kind of rambles along until it’s over. The major battle scenes and how much time each one gets feel like they were picked at complete random. There’s Toulon, a Montage of fighting in Egypt, a long sequence at Austerlitz, a very brief glimpse of Borodino, and an excessively long Waterloo. There’s no dramatic crushing of his army the Berezina River and there was the Battle of Leipzig, which was the single largest battle in European history upt to that point. He just retreats from Moscow and the movie skips to him abdicating the throne.

The Austerlitz battle in particular was a weird mish mash of little computer-generated soldiers running around the map, like a watching a livestream of someone else playing a computer game. It wasn’t very interesting. Of course there was the obligatory Eisenstein reference with the enemy soldiers falling through the ice, but it’s so tired and cliche I don’t know why American filmmakers are still so convinced this is a clever thing to do.

What really hurts Napoleon is that all of these episodes in Napoleon’s life have been done before in previous movies, and much better. If you’ve watched the 1966 Soviet adaption of War and Peace and the 1970 film Waterloo, you’ll recognize many of the same moments depicted in Napoleon, but with competent writers and actors, and no lazy CGI. I assume Ridley Scott as seen Waterloo, so I don’t know how he could depict that moment Napoleon returns from exile without feeling embarrassed.

All of the CGI in the movie looks just as bad as in the trailer.

Ian Kummer

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