Philip Curtis

Unfortunately Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix let us down on this one. The entire life and career of Napoleon was perhaps always going to be too difficult to capture in a movie of any length without omissions but the entire plot seems disjointed and we get no real sense of the importance of any character beyond Napoleon and Josephine or any event beyond their tempestuous relationship. Everything in this movie just feels rushed and superficial even the battle scenes which you expect Ridley Scott to be a master of by now. The movie just tries to cover too much too quickly. The great director Stanley Kubrick famously wanted to make a Napoleon film but perhaps eventually realized that he couldn't do the man and the subject matter justice.