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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
Ridley Scott's Napoleon produced by Apple belongs on Apple TV.
I know it's hard to condense a prolific 28 years of a legendary individual down to 2.5 hours but this isn't the way to do it. It's a jumbled mess of chaotic cuts and jumps that don't have any structure.
This is a thoroughly 1-dimension depiction of Napoleon. Joaquin Phoenix is horribly miscast and gives one of the worst performances of his career. This is likely due to a bad script and bad direction. His voice is the wrong timbre & cadence, his entire presentation is a comic-book Penguin caricature.
Ridley Scott does nothing to explain the motivations of Napoleon aside from a trite attempt to frame his life within the borders of him being an almost-autistic dork dealing with his obsession with a woman. Then he casually throws in the 3,000,000 Napoleon killed before the closing credits without having explored any of the actual themes of Napoleon and Revolutionary France that led to this with any insight or meaning.
The few battles are poorly explained. The brilliant maneuvers and cunning of Napoleon's Marshalls are all ignored. Strategy is barely perceived. It's just a melee of crowds running into each other interspersed with awkward grunts & stares by Phoenix.
Here are two better versions of The Battle of Waterloo:
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Hahaha...holy ####, this is eerie. I saw it today with my wife and we both disliked it immensely. When discussing it, we said literally every single point you said here. It was an absolute chore to get through, which is something I would never thought I would say about a character or period so imminently fascinating. It was a brutal job of a film that had such potential.
I really liked Vanessa Kirby in it, but that was about it. They also missed on the potential in their relationship. They hint early on about the intense sexuality, but then proceed to give us horribly awkward scenes between the two when they're being "romantic" (this was my wife's biggest complaint).
I hate to #### on productions that swing big and miss, but I don't think I am here. I don't think they even really took a swing at anything big.
A surprisingly poor film that will be quickly soon forgotten. I give points to some of the visuals and scale of the scenes, but that's it. 2.5/10. Don't bother with it.