Movie Review: Napoleon

From the trailers and TV commercials, the new movie “Napoleon”, directed by Ridley Scott, looked to be a huge epic and best picture nominee for this year’s Oscars. The problem with this film right from the start is the performance of Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix, who for the first 3rd of this movie seems to be sleepwalking through his role, with way too few lines. Joaquin’s lack of dialogue does pick up later in the story, but despite more lines, Joaquin still seems to be too bored and disinterested to be the star of this historical movie. His half-asleep personality throughout this film will probably preclude any chance at an Oscar nomination. Then due to the relatively low ratings of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes – there is a high probability that this movie might not be nominated for many Oscars, if any. The many problems with this film are a shame because this should have been a great movie about one of the most controversial and important war generals in history.

Where this movie does succeed in a very big way is with the extremely well-shot battle scenes, showing the horrific ways young men in the early 1800s died in battle. Many of the soldiers are ordered to stand right into the line of fire while a small ball of iron obliterates their chest, and legs or just blows their heads off. Some soliders are even playing drums just waiting for their turn to die.

Then there are the small and large cannon balls, also made of iron that blow up everything around the marching soldiers, cutting hundreds of them to ribbons. This movie starts with the beheading of Marie Antoinette with a guillotine, and right from the beginning, this film is not for any moviegoer who is disturbed by the constant visuals of death. In the early days of warfare, death was commonplace, with little or no medical expertise to save any soldier wounded in battle. At the end of this movie, it was mentioned that in the 61 battles that Napoleon led in his lifetime, 3 million men died. There was no mention of how many were wounded.

The other failure in this movie was the lack of detailed explanations of the battles and why they were being fought. Some of the brilliant Napoleon’s battle strategies are shown, but not enough, missing the point that Napolean’s genius as a general is one of the most interesting parts of his life story.

Napolean’s relationship with Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby I thought was covered well enough, revealing several details about their marriage and divorce that most people probably did not know. There was too much of the movie devoted this Napoleon and Josephine and not enough about Napoleon’s war career. This movie does tend to be slow and boring in too many areas.

The other good news is that this movie, while long at 2 hours and 38 minutes does not seem to be too long.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 69% is probably too low, with my rating of around 75% and a recommendation mainly for the history lesson and the extremely well produced battle scenes.