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.
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!