I went into Napoleon expecting a somewhat boring movie, but a Ridley Scott movie, so probably some amount of "scale." He tends to make things seem big, and likes to make what they used to call Epics, before the term was destroyed by the Internet. I did not come in expecting particularly accurate history, but a big story about a character which gestures vaguely at history.
What I got instead was a totally disjointed mess. If this movie had been better, I might have had occasion to start wondering about that historical accuracy, and looking for the weird choices he made in the things he chose to keep or not keep from Napoleon's real life. I may have sought to apply reason to determine why he felt the things he made up were in keeping with the spirit of the narrative he was telling about this man (and probably complained about it). Instead, I didn't care about any of that, because it was just so unbelievably boring.
Choosing to make Napoleon a deeply offputting weirdo is certainly a choice that could be made. Casting Joaquin Phoenix certainly supports that choice. But it also feels a little like he's still the "hero" of the movie in the director's eyes, despite exhibiting no heroic traits whatsoever, and coming off like a sad incel loser (yes, you can be an incel even if you have sex: for an example, see Napoleon, in this movie). He does an admirable job demonstrating that it's a self-inflicted mindset rather than any sort of description of reality, in fact. No amount of power, glory, sex, or anything else can cure his insecurity. The problem is n my epics, I do prefer to have someone to root for; after all, I'm stuck there for a long time.
I hear that despite the rest of it, people did like the battle scenes in the movie. They were fine, I guess. I was not moved. Mostly, they were a relief from having to see Napoleon in any other environment.
On top of these problems, the pacing was extremely terrible, the worst I've seen since Rebel Moon, completely erratic in its rush to end some scenes and lethargy to end others, coherent transitions between them completely out of the question a lot of the time. Oh well, at least the French nationalists hated it.
Score: 3/10
IMDb: Napoleon
PS: I don't have much to add, really. He's made some great movies in his time (Alien, for instance) and some bad ones (Prometheus). If you want my recommendation for his most underrated, though, in his signature style, it would be Kingdom of Heaven, and more specifically the director's cut version which extends it somewhat significantly and restores some important scenes. Like Napoleon, its historical accuracy might be questionable, but it fulfills the intent of doing so to tell a story. And even better than making the French nationalists mad, it made the Christian fundamentalists furious.
