Napoleon: Ridley Scott Meets His Waterloo

Napoleon” is a spectacle-filled action epic that details the checkered rise and fall of the iconic French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix. Against a stunning backdrop of large-scale filmmaking orchestrated by legendary director Ridley Scott, the film captures Bonaparte’s relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his one true love, Josephine, showcasing his visionary military and political tactics against some of the most dynamic practical battle sequences ever filmed.

Review:

Ridley’s Scott’s Napoleon has historical sweep, ambition and enough emotional disregard from its main character to make it a dusty relic. Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) can barely work up a lather for uninhibitedly fucking each other. They’re simply too busy mind fucking each other to be bothered with the real things. Each wants to win the battle of wits over conquering each other’s hearts.

World conquering is the easy thing for Napoleon. Josephine is harder. The cycle of nation conquering followed by failed bedroom conquests is Napoleon’s cinematic plot rhythm. Mud and blood, literal, metaphorical, rhetorical is its constant patina. The battles are fabulously played but emotionally neutered. The bodies pile up and Napoleon just shrugs. They’re his ego sacrifice. His emotional bareness consumes his world, even to Josephine’s womb. Her inability to grant him an heir becomes an insult to his potency, the great man looking in the mirror and seeing the one pimple that makes him less great, beautiful.

By the time Wellington (Rupert Everett) shows up to dish Bonaparte his Waterloo, the audience is ready for the supercilious mirror fun that the character provides. Wellington’s perpetual sneering becomes a welcome relief to all the disregard. He may care haltingly but at least he cares. This is the male mirror that Josephine is forever seeking when Napoleon fucks her doggy style. Wellington and Napoleon‘s brief skirmishes across the terror of the mind, the emotional battlefield may be the film’s true love story— and its brief, infrequent, and ends in premature ejaculation. Napoleon, the movie, is a sick twist of a tryst- a double helix of sadomasochistic desire and overweening ego.

Yet, the film is handsome to behold. What the eye sees is admirable depth of field, a lot of naked clarity, all costumed and prancing in and out and beyond. Napoleon is Napoleon’s biggest flaw. Napoleon‘s great leadership skills are never seen. Even his famed strategic military skills are reduced to barking orders and covering his ears when the canons blast. The man remains hidden, vacant- a person who never shows his hand to the world. Phoenix plays him stiff and expressionless, a passionless cipher. He lacks the oomph of greatness.