Napoleon            1 ½ stars

The long-anticipated Ridley Scott epic Napoleon about the man who sought to conquer all of Europe appeared in theaters on November 22 and I was there for the first day. It combines my interest in movies and military history so it was a must see. Joaquin Phoenix (of Walk the Line and Gladiator) portrays the emperor from his rise to power from an artillery officer to claim the throne through a coup, to his ultimate demise and exile from France. We also get a big dose of his love life with his wife, Josephine, taking up way too much of the film. The movie can be described as a spectacle of grand scale battle scenes, grandiose balls with aristocrats decked out in their finest and comical love scenes between the horny Napoleon and the standoffish Josephine. One would expect it to be a difficult task to cover such an expanse of history in a two and a half-hour film, but Scott’s version of it is especially hard to follow to the point of being laughable. There is little to connect the scenes as we pass through the events of history. During the revolution there is a representation of Robespierre, but we don’t really see what he is about or why he was so powerful. A few Marshals of the French army are there, such as Junot, Ney and Berthier, but they are just characters in the background with Napoleon barely interacting with them. During the movie there are scenes depicting the battles of Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo with great looking clashes of soldiers and cavalry charges, but we never get much explanation of why they are being fought. There is no mention of the peninsula war, very little about the Prussians, a major participant in the wars, or of any naval actions. After the burning of Moscow in 1812, we immediately go to Napoleon’s ouster from being emperor ignoring the two years of the war in Prussia. In much of the movie we see a very petulant Napoleon who is all about settling scores with other heads of state, but none of his genius in his vision of a united Europe. In the battle scenes themselves there is nothing to show the tactics of warfare of the time, not to mention all the historical inaccuracies. The British were not entrenched at Waterloo like the movie shows us and there is nothing to show how the British defended farm buildings or used slopes of hills to their advantage. In one scene, Napoleon points to Waterloo on a map saying that is where he will defeat the enemy. (Nevermind that it is the defender that chooses the site of battle, not the attacker.) The funniest line is when Napoleon rages against the British saying “You think you’re so great just because you have boats!”. I had to laugh. Also ridiculous were the sex scenes between the emperor and Josephine making them appear like animals in the act. I would have to say that they did a good job with the uniforms of the soldiers and the weapons of the time. The firing of the artillery and the effects on people and horses did look realistic. But the movie was not worth two and a half hours of my time and I am sure there are much better dramatic works available about Napoleon and the wars in Europe of this period. I don’t know what came over Ridley Scott to create this mess.