Joaquin Phoenix gives the absolute worst performance of his career as Napoleon Buonaparte, choosing to portray one of history’s most famously charismatic leaders, as a wooden cutout. No movie these days would be complete without Reddit/Marvel-tier quipped dialogue, and this screenplay provides it in spades. Many of the events that would naturally adapt to the big screen are skipped in favor of shots of Phoenix crawling under tables like some fucked up dog. No mention is made of Italy, and Spain and Haiti are skipped over as to avoid portraying the subject in any kind of negative light. Irresponsible and reactionary filmmaking shines through in a script that truly feels like it was written by chatgpt. The film concludes with him suddenly dying in a part that reminded me of the poochy “my planet needs me” bit. Do not waste your time. I was expecting a cheesy Hollywood retelling and it didn’t even do that, despite having more than enough source material to do so.
No movie these days would be complete without Reddit/Marvel-tier quipped dialogue, and this screenplay provides it in spades.
I want to imagine Napoleon Bonaparte played as Napoleon Dynamite.
If Napoleon Bonaparte is history on horseback, Napoleon Dynamite is history riding a llama.
There’s a part where Napoleon is treating with a British envoy and as he’s storming off, he turns around and petulantly quips, seemingly on the verge of tears, “YOU THINK YOU’RE SO GREAT JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE BOATS!” And I could absolutely see Napoleon dynamite delivering that line to one of his classmates.
I imagine Blucher and his Prussians arriving on Napoleon's flank at Waterloo by stepping out of Avengers portals.
That would have been better. Instead they appear off-camera and you get a shot of a geriatric Wellington going “thank god they’re here” and you never really see them.
I love the part where Napoleon said "It's Napoleo time" and then Napoleo'd all over the British
I lost all interest when Ridley Scott decided to cut the part where Napoleon falsely tries to convert to the true faith of the prophet Mohammed which led to his downfall in waterloo
A movie just on Napoleon in Egypt would have been more interesting. Its a less explored topic than say the battle of Waterloo.
or napoleon in italy. poor, badly equipped soldiers, little plucky nobody napoleon betting big AND ACTUALLY PULLING IT OFF.
and it's not fucking waterloo. who cares. most covered part of the whole thing, because the english were in it.
The Italian campaign would be AMAZING. Give us his speech to the Army of Italy dammit
Seriously, reading Andrew Roberts' biography of him, I came away thinking Napoleon had genuinely lost his mind when I read his writings from the period. It's been a while, but I recall that he harbored fevered fantasies of going rogue and installing himself as some kind of latter day pharoah or caliph in Egypt and creating some grand new society in his image. A movie about the Egyptian campaign would be entertaining as fuck.
Great concept. That is a movie I'd watch. One man's descent into megalomania, maybe foreshadowing his eventual seizing of power and turning his laurel crown into an imperial one.
Right? There's so much untapped entertainment value with Napoleon, but all that anyone seems to want to do is Waterloo, Russia, and Austerlitz
like Aguirre, Wrath of God by Werner Herzog
the proof of concept is there
But think of an alt history film where he actually does it and it goes to shit
We need more counterfactual history movies in this world, and I'd watch the hell out of that one
Has this guy in fact been coasting off of the reputation of the two good movies he made for like 40 years?
Well it did give us Reds. So what I’m saying is it’s ok when we do it. Most of the time it just gives us dumb bullshit from long-past-relevant prehistoric filmmakers trying to relive their glory days by making shitty mobster films and casting their prehistoric actor buddies and deaging them so they look like an affront-to-god experimental lab creature that looks 35 but acts 100.
idk why you had to unload a mag into Scorsese but his films all kick ass even (especially) the one with de-aged grandpa De Niro
nooo deaged grandpa deniro dont toe me death! careful, you might lose your balance, fall, break your hip, and slowly decline. nooo, grandpa denirooooo
yeah that scene sucked but it was basically irrelevant to the heart of the film, which is about how life keeps going and you grow old, seeing all the high drama and intrigue and murder you destroyed your entire life over be rendered meaningless because everyone involved just decays & dies of old age. It was almost a response to film itself and an argument against seeing your life through the lens of having some sort of plot.
What I say is bullshit is the "this visionary genius who has the most prominent name on this movie you like is implied to have singlehandedly made that movie and therefore unfettered control over an upcoming movie will surely be at least as good" belief that almost never goes as promised.
so like Nolan?
Oppenheimer's pacing was so weird that I fast fowarded the movie on some part
This movie and Oppenheimer had a lot in common, although this made Oppenheimer look like a masterpiece. Both films suffer because they’re both so obsessed with their subjects that they claustrophobically center the entire movie on them instead of exploring the interesting worlds they inhabit.
I lost all interest in the movie when Ridley Scott had Napoleon get infected by the magic black goo which turned him into a zombie.
Waterloo is a way better movie. All real extras. All from the actual Soviet army.
Rod Steiger was so good in his portrayal of Napoleon that I think he could play a good Mussolini
and he did apparently
Did not know that. Gotta check it out later. Gotta be way better than George C Scott.
That movie is so damn good. Nothing can replace the era when Hollywood was throwing money at tens of thousands of people for battle scenes.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
War and Peace is better and has the same director (and also has Napoleon!).
That sucks. Joaquin Phoenix is a good actor. I've heard lots of bad things about this one
The performance is more Joker than jacobin. He’s a whiney, mumbly weirdo the entire film. No rousing speeches, no galvanizing orders of the day, just Phoenix moaning his way through Nickelodeon - level dialogue.
I have more complaints about this movie than I feel would be polite to heap on people that I actually like, but for everyone's sake, either avoid this movie in favor of Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo, or if it's too late for you, go watch it to get the taste out of your mouth. It's free on youtube, and it's pretty good quality.
Rod Steiger's performance as Napoleon is regarded as hit or miss, but I personally feel it gets across Napoleon's charisma, mental acuity, and mercurial temper perfectly.
And importantly, unlike Napoleon, which I felt was trying to be three different types of movie at once and ultimately had no real identity, Waterloo is very tightly focused, and also unlike Napoleon, is (for a film anyway) extremely well-researched and historically accurate.
Then of course my favorite part, the sheer number of extras the production pulled together for the big battle. Napoleon's battle scenes were a travesty, resembling not at all the actual history and being so much smaller in scope. Does anybody know if Scott used live extras for the battle scenes? I can't be fucked to check. At any rate, Bondarchuk pulled in something like 15,000 people for the battle scenes, and the way they're shot gives the impression of an honest to god Napoleonic army up on screen.
Most importantly though, Waterloo is actually entertaining, which Napoleon was not. And if you ask me that's the one unforgiveable sin for any movie. How can you fuck up making an actually entertaining movie about such a huge personality as Napoleon? I'm not even gonna get into the weird psychosexual stuff, or Letizia Bonaparte being turned into a creepier version of Barry Lyndon's mom. Just go watch Waterloo, or Barry Lyndon, or anything else.
Soviet war movies have that special "let's go for the most massive scenes we can make" thing. "Liberation" (1971) has absolutely insane scenes where hundreds of soldiers, tanks and artillery pieces were mobilized to recreate WW2 battles, some in their historic places. They even went as far as building replicas of German WW2 tanks because they couldn't find working original ones, they also used post-WW2 tanks but this is normal for the time, like in the movie "Patton", the Germans in Africa are using Patton tanks painted with German markings lol.
In Liberation they paid HUGE attention to uniforms and the actors themselves, Stalin looks like Stalin, Rokossovsky looks like Rokossovsky, Hitler looks like Hitler, Mussolini looks like Mussolini, Zhukov looks like Zhukov. The russians speak Russian and the germans speak German, it's amazing how well it is done.
That movie covers a lot of WW2, even Tito and Vlasov make an appearance, it's just brilliant.
I'd never heard of this one, I'll have to give it a watch! Sounds like it's exactly my thing. And yes, bless Cold War-era Russian directors, their attention to detail is astonishing
It's actually a movie series, like 4 or 5 of them. They're all on Youtube too!
Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo
I love that movie! So, do good! Stieger and Plummer are perfect
Umm aktually according to rotten tomatoes Waterloo has only 27% rotten tomatoes rating.
I knew it was gonna be dog-shit when I saw Ridley Scott's name attached to it lol. It does make me want to rewatch Barry Lyndon, which is actually a good movie unlike Napoleon.
edit: I was too harsh on Ridley. I didn't know he directed The Last Duel, which is one of my favorite films of the 2020s so far. Defo not washed up.
I like Ridley as a cinematographer, his movies always tend to -look- gorgeous, but he's a shit story teller. So overall I think the wrong Scott brother died.
Many of the events that would naturally adapt to the big screen are skipped in favor of shots of Phoenix crawling under tables like some fucked up dog.
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One of the worst things about this is that Ridley did make an absolutely amazing Napoleonic Era movie - his first one, The Duellists. He knocked it out of the park with literally his first one, and now we've gotten to “When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.’” (like, my guy, how the fuck do you think history works? "were you there", what kind of retort is this even)
When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.
the soyjak "i studied this for my entire career"
vs. the chad "did you see the big bang? didn't think so"
Also we fucking have so many personal accounts of the guy. Everyone who shook his hand wrote a memoir about it
From another of his recent interviews
‘I think we’ve been monitored for years!’ roars Scott. ‘How did the Egyptians build the pyramids? Rolling 20-tonne stones on logs? F*** off!’
‘We’ve got to step on this shit now, and move forward with incredibly tight constraints. If I design an AI, then tell it to design another one even smarter, what’s next? It could close down England, the internet, [drop] a hydrogen bomb. The compound interest is scary.’
This movie already managed to turn me against it once I saw a poster for it featuring vegan activist Joaquin Phoenix riding a horse
The poster in Hexbear dot net are not happy with the Napoleon movie
That's okay, I will still watch that garbage
At least do whatever you can to avoid paying for it. Heed my warning. Learn from my folly, or meet my same fate.
The perfect Napoleon movie exists and it's free
It's called watching War and Peace (1966) following by Waterloo (1970)
you can add in Toussaint Louverture (2012) as additional content
The only factor that matters when casting a character is if the actor has a similar nose and similar eyes. Everything else is secondary.
so i guess we're not getting a historical epic revival any time soon, huh
Unfortunately it looks like the History Extended Universe is going to have to wait a bit.
Oppenheimer was pretty good I thought, even though it was such a Christopher Nolan movie
