Napoleon is a fat, slobbering pig of a movie that commands its 158 minutes like the emperor-general himself, taking what it wants when it wants simply because it was there. Absolutely unhinged. Bravo!

That biography you barely remember from ninth grade has left you with all you need to know of the plot. Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix), a French military officer in the late 1700s, scores several key victories in North Africa. He returns home after the French Revolution to exploit the power vacuum, crowning himself Emperor Napoleon I and proceeding to invade everyone, conquering most of Mainland Europe before being defeated. As punishment, Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a small island off the coast of Italy, then he swims back to France and almost conquers Europe again!

Highlighted snapshots of this narrative are intercut about 50/50 with scenes from Napoleon’s love affair with Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), his first wife and empress for the first six years of his reign.

And Napoleon very much is narrative. The film has been harangued by historians for including several impossible scenes, omitting Napoleon’s non-military accomplishments and the direct path from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars. Several key images of the film, like Napoleon attending the execution of Marie Antoinette, shooting the pyramids with a cannon and meeting Duke Wellington after Waterloo, are complete fabrications. The film has been called anti-French and based mostly in English propaganda, including direct comparisons between Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, and yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Director/producer Ridley Scott is a knight of the crown from a military family in Tyne and Wear. This movie wasn’t made for Francs.

The film depicts Napoleon as an oafish brute, earning his victories mostly by bringing cannons to cavalry fights, and Joséphine as all-consuming maw who used her body to survive the Revolution and is still cramming them down like her survival depends on it. It’s not history, it’s a sprawling, messy soap opera with just-as-messy performances, fantastic costumes and thick smattering of bombastic action set pieces like they’re going out of style.

Watching Napoleon feels like being transported back through Hollywood history to the tail end of the Golden Age, when studios were going all-out to compete with television, and budgets centralized into these massive historical epics, now on modern Panavision and Ari Alexa cameras.

Ironically enough, it’s an Apple+ property, the company’s major awards release of 2023 along with Killers of the Flower Moon. Apple, along with Amazon, entered the streaming wars purely as a money-making exercise, executing on the basic idea of investing in entertainment media and then selling it and betting they could do it better than Netflix or the legacy studios fumbling their transition to streaming-first, and so far, so good. This is an impressive, aggressive pair of movies in an investment sense, each with major directors, superhero-scale budgets and large-format releases, and they haven’t worked out at the box office, but have collected 13 Oscar nominations between them and can be counted as major draws to the streaming platform. There’s an ambition and an apparent commitment to art and artists here, a willingness to risk major dollars on a project where the main concern is making a good movie first and marketing it second, that is distressingly absent at Disney and Warner Bros. right now. 

At 206 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon is obviously assuming many viewers will be watching it comfortably from their couches. Napoleon is a much more reasonable 157 minutes, but Scott has this in mind as well – a 250 minute director’s cut is planned for streaming release at some point.

There aren’t many movies worth watching for four hours, but a four-hour version of Napoleon, I can’t wait for. This movie is bananas! It feels like half of all mass battle scenes released in 2023 are in this movie, just scene after scene of the type of production an entire blockbuster could be built around. The idea that there’s two more hours they cut out of this is incredible.

As anti-French as the movie is, there’s also something undeniably French about it. Scott got his start at the end of the New Hollywood era, which sprang directly from French New Wave in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and you can see very French ideas about unconventional narrative structure everywhere in Napoleon. It seems like the whole project was just an excuse to crank out these massive battle scenes, with any sense of cohesion in the final product being a happy accident – well, not an accident, heroic work from editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo – and what a wonderful excuse it turned out to be.

When you think of Scott, you still think Alien, Blade Runner and a bunch of other movies that don’t come close. The running thread between those two is set and costume design, and Arthur Max’ Oscar-nominated production design and David Corssman and Janty Yates’ costume design work is spectacular, even if design doesn’t tell the entire story the way those first two films do.  

Even if Scott is just a set wrangler on this, it would take an experienced guy to wrangle these sets. The immense battlefields of Napoleon sprawl across the screen, and the camera floats through them like they’re nothing – part of what adds to the scale is we don’t see many master shots of the entire field. The camera takes the perspective of a person inside these storms of bullets and cannonfire, and as our hero advances, we see the endless scale unfold in real time.

Often, the camera follows Napoleon himself – the first set piece is the Siege of Toulon, one of the few battles that Napoleon personally led the charge into, but it leaves no room in the film to doubt his own bloodlust. Phoenix’ workmanlike performance in these scenes shows a character who fully believes in himself and his plans, and his violent behavior and lovemaking in later scenes are not a repressed armchair general, but a swashbuckler who’s always comfortable getting his hands dirty.

At the center of this detached collection of scenes, Phoenix delivers a detailed, precise performance of wild outbursts, disaffection and spontaneous moments of almost messianic glory, equal parts contemplative and meticulous and hilarious and carefree. Napoleon engages in a different kind of masculine fantasy, not one of righteous, avenging violence, but of self-expression, the power to be able to snap at anyone who annoys you and not face consequences. It is still a fantasy of letting out frustration, but one that doesn’t demand consideration for all the people he kills – that’s another matter.

Napoleon ends, and this is probably at the center of the French objections, by laying out the losses in battles he commanded, as if he, like Hitler, started the wars he’s associated with on his own whims and as if he is as culpable for soldiers who died in battle as Hitler is for citizens he ordered rounded up by trainload based on race and fumigated like vermin – obviously a ridiculous comparison. That said, Napoleon and Hitler can’t help but look at least vaguely similar to the rest of Europe. They remain Europe’s most recent conquerors, and they were each defeated twice, by the Russian winter to the east and by every other power in the world ganging up on them to the west. Just as Napoleon was an old artillery officer who won a lot of his battles by focusing more on cannons than the other side, Hitler was one of the only World War II leaders who saw the trenches and early tanks first-hand, and the Panzer Division was central to the Blitzkrieg.

Napoleon will disappoint as a history, but it is not a work of history, it is a work of mythology. Let the biographers write the biographies – this film is about brilliant period detail, wild acting and a dazzling collection of war scenes that feels like it could only have been brought together here.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.