Napoleon (2023) Dir. Ridley Scott

It’s not easy to compress a man’s life into a single film, let alone a man who played a significant role in European history in the way that Napoleon Bonaparte did. When Abel Gance attempted it in the 1920s, he produced a film that exists in a five and a half hour cut and still only made it to Napoleon’s wedding to Joséphine, with the rest of the story to be told in subsequent, unreleased films.

Because of this, I feel confident in the contradictory statement that Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour film is both too long and too short. Unable to satisfactorily cover any aspect of Napoleon’s life, it feels like a slog to sit through and a missed opportunity. Perhaps the upcoming four-hour cut that will screen on Apple TV will be better, but this feels like two films crammed into one.

The battle scenes are exciting to a point but occur with little context. Scott rushes through the film to such an extent that it is hard to keep track of exactly why Napoleon is going to war yet again. As more battles are crammed into the running time, you also wonder where more famous aspects of Napoleon’s campaign are. Where is the trek across the Alps, when time is given to historically inaccurate moments such as cannons being fired at the pyramids?

The speedy pacing also means that few characters have a chance to shine here. Scott, and screenwriter David Scarpa, seem to have great fun implying that both royalist and revolutionary France was populated with self-important buffoons but never actually explain the political movements that led to Napoleon taking charge, or convincing a newly republic country to accept him as an emperor.

Ten years went by between the revolution and Napoleon taking the throne, and yet here we zip from one event to another without any sense of time passing.

And what of the main performances? Pheonix remains a magnetic screen presence but his performance as Napoleon is subdued. There are witty moments and attempts to show this historical figure as someone more neurotic, but again no time is really given to this. Vanessa Kirby does her best as Joséphine, but the script flip-flops between her being an ambitious woman using Napoleon for his influence, to fiery lover, to lovesick (and eventually very sick) divorcee at such a pace that she appears two dimensional.

A lot has been said about the death of the blockbuster this year, with many failing to recoup their budgets at the box office. Napoleon is such an aggressively average film in its current form that it’s no wonder audiences are moving away from these spectacles.

Perhaps the four-hour cut will be better, in which case Apple should have released the film in two parts, ala Denis Villeneuve’s Dune or Steven Soderbergh’s Che.

★★

2/ 5

Matthew Tilt

Twitter @Matthew_Tilt