Before I would ever pan anything or speak ill of someone else's art, I will first speak well of it. To speak well of Ridley Scott's, NAPOLEON, we say that it is a two hundred-million-dollar Hollywood production directed by one of the World's great period directors. The Production values are marvelous because that's the one thing you get with a two-hundred-million-dollar budget - outstanding period costuming and sets. NAPOLEON is a series of well-produced historical anecdotes but not all are accurate. If you browse social media posts, you'll see a myriad of comments praising the film. These are either sock accounts meant to tout the film or People who know absolutely squat about Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. They all thought the film was the cat's meow, but if you know about Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars, then the film will be a great disappointment and you'll wish you had spent your thirty bucks on a blowjob from a crack whore and not popcorn, soda, and a bag of fucking skittles.
Essentially the problem is that the Film tries to tell two stories, one of which couldn't possibly be told in eight hours let alone 158 minutes. Those of us who were following the development of the film were led to believe that it would be a story of the love affair between Napoleon and Trois-ĂŽlets, Martinique a.k.a. Josephine. This probably would have made a fine 'chick flick' but disastrously, like an inexperienced General on a battlefield, Ridley divides his forces between a love story and a tenth-grade picture history of the Napoleonic Wars and not a very good one at that. The result is failure on two fronts. It's greatest absurdity is L'empeur participating in the grand charge of the cavalry at Waterloo, a battle in which Napoleon, suffering no doubt from early stages of stomach cancer which will take his life while in exile on St. Helena, spent most of the day in his tent sleeping. If Ridley needed an anecdote to detail the valor of Napoleon Bonapart, he should have portrayed a short scene of him standing upon the dyke at Arcole Bridge during the Italian Campaign holding the Colors and extolling his men into battle as junior staff were being shot down around him in a torrent of Austrian musket fire. L'empeur must not engage in direct combat and neither should Ridley Scott in portraying it.