SEE THIS IF YOU LIKED
WATERLOO 1970
Rod Steiger donned the tricorne hat for this Hundred Days epic. The battle scenes – featuring 15,000 costumed extras – still dazzle.
GLADIATOR 2000
Russell Crowe got the plaudits, but Phoenix's Commodus is a villain for the ages in Scott's iconic hit.
BEAU IS AFRAID 2023
Fewer battles than Napoleon, but Oedipal issues are similarly central in Ari Aster's Phoenixstarring odyssey.
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Before spiralling costs forced him to retreat, Stanley Kubrick famously claimed that his planned Napoleon biopic would be ‘the best movie ever made’. Ridley Scott hasn't reached those unimaginable heights with his own account of the French autocrat's life, but this masterfully marshalled, entertainingly playful historical epic is one of the legendary director's finest features in almost two decades.
Opening with the macabre execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793, David Scarpa's smartly focused screenplay covers Napoleon's life from his careermaking role in ending the Siege of Toulon, to his death in exile on Saint Helena 30 years later. The half a dozen or so battles depicted provide Napoleon with its blockbuster thrills. But the film is as much a character piece about Bonaparte and his voracious wife, Joséphine – their unconventional relationship a public balancing act between power and love.
Abandoning the faux-continentalaccent requirements that made Scott's House of Gucci almost impossible to take seriously, Phoenix plays the generalturned-emperor in his vanilla American accent, and at the precise nexus between Gladiator’s Commodus and Beau Is Afraid’s titular loser – the source of much of the film's humour. On the battlefield, he's commanding and ruthless. At home, he is flustered, buffoonish and hopelessly in thrall to Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby, whose innate confidence is the perfect fit for Napoleon's troublesome life partner.
While the film clocks in at a little over two and a half hours, there's an awful lot to fit in, and the approach here is necessarily elliptical. The highlight is undoubtedly the mid-film Battle of Austerlitz, a sequence of extraordinary tension, terror and tactility. Visual
Ridley Scott Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett, Mark Bonnar, Ben Miles David Scarpa Sony/Apple 158 mins effects unquestionably play an integral role in bringing to the screen the battle sequences, with their ferocious cannon fire, thousands of charging cavalrymen and exploding horses. But how satisfying that a film of this scale feels grounded in some semblance of reality.
