Napoleon is a 2023 Columbia Pictures and Apple TV+ original movie directed by Ridley Scott and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. This movie, as you may have guessed given the title, follows the rise and fall of one of history’s most talked about leaders, monsieur Napoleon Bonaparte. I love me some history and throughout the various podcasts I’ve listened to and research I have done myself, I’ve learned quite a bit about Napoleon and his life and legacy, so I guess you could say my expectations were decently high going into this movie. I understand that most all history movies will purposely inflate certain details or add things and leave other things out just for the sake of keeping the movie intriguing and giving it the “Hollywood effect” if you will, so with that in mind I always give historical films a little bit of leeway in that department. As long as they stay truthful to the events that actually took place and don’t mess with the actual timeline of things too much then I won’t gripe too hard in that regard. I have my gripes with this movie though and a lot of things I could pick apart personally, but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the experience and that this didn’t succeed in keeping my attention because it certainly did.
Keeping that in mind we will get to the things I enjoyed first, and that is first and foremost the battle sequences. The battles were well shot and had a level of intensity and brutality that kept me captivated throughout, specifically the battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo were my favorites. They added a touch of the Hollywood magic to it sure, but it was well done here and shined light on the intensity and magnitude of battles in that era of time. I wish there was even more focus on Napoleon as a war general and a leader than there was because he was truly an innovator of his time with his battle strategies and the way he used the army’s cannons in that time period and everything else, but we didn’t get to dive too deep into his war mindset. Everything was sort of rushed through in this movie altogether it felt like, even though the movie itself felt long. It was like a montage of his greatest hits and worst failures without much time explaining and building up to the battles. They attempted to cover some of the French revolution, Napoleon’s rise to general and eventually emperor, his messy and tangled history with Josephine, and his eventual fall and two separate exiles in the span of two and a half hours, so it led to many things feeling rushed through and not given the proper time to develop given his expansive legacy. I could have gone for more of the strategist, leader, and conqueror side of Napoleon and a bit less on the toxic, volatile, obsessive relationship between him and Josephine. I understand that that was a huge part of his life and legacy and a big part of what made him who he was, so a lot of that had to be in there, but they focused more attention on that than the history making side of his life it felt like at times and most of those scenes were somewhat unpleasant and uncomfortable to deal with so I didn’t want to spend as much time with them as we did.
That being said, overall, I feel like Vanessa Kirby may have been the best acting performance of the film as Josephine. Even though I didn’t necessarily like her, and she was just as toxic and cold as he was at times, she wasn’t necessarily meant to be liked and did a good job of showing emotion and evoking emotion out of you as a viewer. Joaquin is a good actor, and I was overall there to see Napoleon Bonaparte obviously, but Joaquin also acts kind of similarly in many of his roles with his deadpan and almost dreary mannerisms and stiff body language. I’m not sure that worked all the time with this character or if I would have liked more emotion out of him during the battle scenes and arguments with Josephine. He came off cool and collected and I feel like given his overly stressful life in almost every single aspect that it would have been human to show him unraveling at the seams in his moments alone a bit more. Another obvious gripe that I can manage to look past is that Joaquin and Vanessa portrayed Napoleon and Josephine for the entire length of the film and the film covered 15-20 years (during the late 1700s-early 1800s mind you) and they did not make much of an attempt to make them look much younger or older at any point in the film even though they would clearly age and in at least Napoleon’s case gain weight throughout that period of time. Overall, if you’re into history or well-done cinematography I would check this movie out, you can wait till it hits streaming though and save the money because once it is out of theaters it will drop onto Apple+ since they’re tied to the making of the movie. I’m excited for this film’s streaming release because it will be dropped simultaneously with Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of the movie with an hour and half of added footage that was cut from the theatrical release. Perhaps that can take away some of my gripes with this movie and add more detail and build up where the film was lacking.
