Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023)

Coming this November.

My impressions so far:

• The movie is setting out to cover 22 years of Napoleon's career in a 158-minute runtime, which I... kind of doubt is really doable without upsetting a lot of people? I have a hard time seeing how the movie could offer more than a passing glance at, say, his rise to power in Italy, or the invasion of Spain (never mind things he wasn't personally present for, like Haiti). I don't want to write off the whole thing before release, but it feels especially jarring when you remember the opposite route taken by Scott's directorial debut, The Duellists.
  • I feel that telling a serious story of Napoleon's life (rather than just specific episodes like Waterloo) requires a fair look at both the people around him (this coming from someone who's personally fascinated by Bernadotte and Madame Tallien) and the European monarchy and aristocracy he went up against; otherwise you'd risk dumbing it down to a "lmao hubris" story, forgoing a serious examination of its real-world politics.

• Joaquin Phoenix has presence and gravitas, but his delivery also comes across as a bit mumbly and lacking in raw charisma. Napoleon was a master manipulator — the movie needs to sell him as someone who could successfully harvest the grassroots manic energy of Revolutionary France and convince millions of people to put their lives on the line for their emperor and the revolution. And I don't buy him at all as a young Napoleon.
  • I've heard someone suggest that the best way to portray the period would be a series in the style of The Crown, with different actors in every season; I'm not sure whether that would work, but watching the 48-year-old Phoenix portray a 24-year-old Napoleon in 1793 sure feels distracting.

• The colour grading is waaay overdone. This feels like something that's gotten more pronounced in Scott's period pieces over time: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven had noticeable blue tints in certain parts but had fairly restrained grading overall, and then Robin Hood (2010) and The Last Duel doubled down on the blue filters for their entire runtime (though it honestly didn't stop me from enjoying the latter quite a lot).

• Some of the historical episodes teased in the trailer:
  • The execution of Marie Antoinette (don't think Napoleon was there)

  • Siege of Toulon

  • 13 Vendémiaire

  • Battle of the Pyramids (depicted as taking place right at the foot of the pyramids, rather than some distance away)

  • Battle of Austerlitz (portraying the discredited tale of the icy lake breaking apart under the Russian army)

  • Burning of Moscow (too soon?)

  • Battle of Waterloo (seemingly including a weird sequence of Napoleon leading a cavalry charge, which could be an Imagine Spot, but also... if they wanted an instance of Napoleon leading from the front, they could've gone with Arcole, 19 years earlier?)

• So far, what we've seen of the battle scenes is rather tropey, over-graded and over-CG'd. The annals of Napoleonic media is full of very technically impressive reenactments, from the 15,000 on-screen extras in Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1966) and Waterloo to the faithful recreation of life aboard a frigate in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. This movie doesn't really feel like it'll stack up; even BBC's War and Peace (2016) seemed to do a better job for its TV budget.

• So what do we have to look forward to? The discourse, of course. The movie has Vanessa Kirby (13 years Phoenix's junior) portray Josephine (6 years Napoleon's senior), which is sure to inspire some interesting online debate. And all things said, Scott is a great visual director, and I have faith that the movie will be a fun watch even if it doesn't offer the most accurate or well-rounded take on the subject.

It’d also be a pity to focus solely on Nap’s military achievements and defeats, when a good deal of his legacy in modern France resides in his political reforms and governance style (the current Fifth Republic is often called a bonapartist regime for a reason). And even that would take more than a single movie to tackle in a nuanced way I think.

But war is more spectacular, I guess.

Most people know Napoleon for how he beat all of Europe over and over again, so it's not that much of a surprise.

Napoleon's popular image has always been based on his military career first and his statesman career second. For the latter, most people remember the Napoleonic Code and rights for French Jews.

is that story about him losing to some bunnies he and his men was trying to hunt true?

I heard the marking line for the movie is something like "He came from Nothing. He conquered Everything".

Which... no, he didn't. He came from a pretty privileged uppercrust background. And he conquered... maybe 2% of the Earth's surface? And his conquering of that *was a bad thing* as he reinstated a lot of things that the Revolution got rid of.

well we all know trailers always lie

I mean, yes, but only to a certain extent.

I feel like it could also be that the film is being very clear on it's view on Napoleon, even if that stance maybe isn't accurate.

i.e. "Everyone likes an Underdog, so we'll shove everyone into an Underdog framing even when it makes no sense".

Not saying Napoleon is doing explicitly what I just described, but more just trying to convey my point. If the film is going to act like Napoleon was some "Self-made Man", then the film did fuck all in research.

To be fair sounds like that 2 percent figure is counting the oceans, and those were not really that conquerable in his lifetime.

I'm just hoping they don't try to present him as some kind of hero or anything like that.

At best, I think the story is going to go for a "Hero of their own story" narrative.

Yes, we all saw that Dan Snow post. Aristocratic upper-crust Oxbridge historian still malding about Bonny 200 years on; news at eleven.

I think we maybe need to recalibrate our framing of "privilege" when we're talking about an era where privileged people were losing their heads left and right. Napoleon was just wealthy/aristocratic enough to land a foot in the École militaire (he had to rush his study after his father died partway through). He was also just poor/obscure enough to escape the Terror.

Basically, his background in the Corsican nobility didn't matter a whole lot past his education and his early military posting on the island; when the royals were carted off to the guillotine in 1793, he was mostly just another officer in the army. Granted, that made him more privileged than 90% of Europeans at the time, but you could apply that same description to just about every major figure of the Revolution.

I suspect the movie can't help but adopt a Great Man framing, because of time constraints if nothing else. The trailer seems to show Abbé Sieyès (?) plotting the 18 Brumaire coup with Napoleon, which at least shows acknowledgment that he had a fair bit of help on his way to power; but I doubt that Scott has enough runtime set aside to explore the role of Napoleon marshalls, or Lazare Carnot, who built the Revolutionary Army he inherited.

But I don't think that Scott is out to portray Napoleon as a poor misunderstood babygirl, either — the trailer calling him a "TYRANT" might be your first clue there. While, again, the runtime no doubt will limit the amount of underhanded stuff the movie might portray, I'd be very surprised if it tries to put a positive spin on, say, Napoleon abandoning his army in Egypt, or installing his siblings as the new European royalty. Given the trailer's focus on his relationship with Josephine and the topic of Scott's previous period piece, I think we might expect his regressive attitudes towards women to feature prominently as well.

…And reinstating slavery, but I don’t know if there’ll be any room to mention that.

There's actually a (kinda questionable) claim that Josephine, who'd grown up on a slave plantation in Martinique, was the person who persuaded Napoleon to revoke the abolition of slavery. Napoleon III would later commission a marble statue of his old aunt on the island, which was defaced by activists during the 2020 BLM protests.

In France, or in Spain.

But he was more progressive than most of the European rulers he defeated, which is saying something.

Not really. As mentioned above, being part of the Corsican nobility meant fuck all in the Old Regime considering Corsica became French at the time Napoleon was born. His family was wealthy enough to send him to a military school, but that's it - it's today's equivalent to being part of the small bourgeoisie, or being the child of a couple of doctors. Not commoner, but nowhere near the seats of power.

He really came to power due to a combination of a ton of luck and circumstance and his abilities as a military commander in Toulon and later Italy. And his later conquests were due in very large part to his "Ability before Birth" mindset when it came to picking his Marshalls.

So "Self-Made", no if you are being literal...but still moreso than basically any other major historical figure.

Edited by Bexlerfu on Jul 17th 2023 at 11:25:45 AM

@Lyendith: Maybe they will have time to mention Haiti, maybe not.

Yeah, to pile on at the end of this I'll say that while it's absolutely true that Napoleon didn't "come from nothing" and that he was far better off than the majority of people in France at the time, he still wasn't exactly part of the bourgeois aristocracy.

His family was on the lower end of the upper classes in terms of wealth, he came from an island that France had only recently annexed and whose people were looked down on hard as "foreign subjects" and "unwashed masses", and his military career started with him being assigned to a relatively shit posting where he was right in the thick of things aiming artillery with his men, a fact that had a lot to do with his birthplace and lack of any familial connections to French high society.

In the grand scheme of things, yes, he was a relatively wealthy person who leveraged his privilege and some natural talents to rise to the top of a system he'd have been more or less barred from if he weren't born wealthy, but within the scope of that system it's not unfair to characterize him as an underdog who rose from the (again, relative) bottom to the absolute top.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jul 17th 2023 at 10:21:21 AM

He was basically representing the wealthy republican landowners having giant beef with the even wealthier royalist remnants.

He was representing the bourgeoisie, but that was also the case of many members of the 1789 Revolution. The Terror was more or less the only time where the bourgeoisie's interests were not at the top of the priority list during that era...and to say that this specific period of time is a can of worms when it comes to historical representation would be an understatement (it's almost the Ur-Example of that).

After that (and Robespierre's death), the moderates got back in charge, and were followed by the Directoire, which was extremely favorable to the bourgeoisie. Bonaparte was basically an enforcer of that regime after Toulon.

The Directoire was crushed between the Royalistes on their right - they wanted a king - and the Jacobins on their left - they were egalitarian. So, to stay in charge, they became more and more autocratic, resorting to several coups - and Napoleon was only the logical conclusion of its evolution, being the most successful military commander within its ranks.

He was more conservative than the Directoire, especially when it came to slavery and the overseas colonies, but he was not tremendously different in his ideas either. He might have been one of the earliest cases of the upper class always going more and more towards the authoritarian right whenever the lower classes start asking for better lives.

The Revolution's leadership wasn't exactly devoid of aristocracy, either: Paul Barras, Napoleon's main benefactor in the Directory (and I believe the person talking to him at the start of the trailer) was much more of a classical aristocrat than he was.

There were nobles like him even in the left (Montagnard) faction of the Committee for Public Safety, though I'm not really familiar with any of the others; AFAIK, most of the revolutionary leadership came from lawyer families.

I also just noticed that the trailer shows Napoleon meeting Josephine at one of the weird balls that death row survivors held after they were freed following Robespierre's death — hence why she's wearing prison rags and haircut (plus a neckband to symbolise the guillotine).

Really if anything Napoleon was the victim in the Wars; most of them were started by the rest of Europe as they repeatedly formed coalitions to try and dethrone him, and he just conquered more and more as he beat them time and again.

Does this movie trailer look bad to you? Because I see the comments on Youtube that just make a fake quote from Napoleon for some reason.

Edited by Bubblepig on Jul 21st 2023 at 1:56:16 AM

I feel like that's just what Youtube comments do for biopics. Nothing about the movie itself in terms of quality.

Yeah that's just a general meme surrounding historical media.

But this is not like Morbius (2022) imo.