In 2023, films are becoming more precariously under budget and somehow less grand than they should be. No studio would ever take a bet on chronicling the life of General Napoleon Bonaparte, detailing the early days of the French Revolution, with Rosbpiere, who used his might of the guillotine and imprisoned over 42,000 odd Frenchman in the Bastille, to his eventual crowning of Emperor, to campaigns across Europe from 1791-1815, where over 3,000,000 men died in his conquest, to his exile on Elba and finally died on St. Helena, off the coast of Africa, there was nothing simple about Napoleon.
Directed by Ridley Scott, whose films range from Historical epics, like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Duelist (1977), The Last Duel (2021), Gladiator (2000)[1]. He fathered one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), but later returned to it with Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), but somehow, makes time to cover Napoleon.
The positives are simple: With the desperation of films going smaller, boring, and uneventful, Ridley Scott broadens the scope of the film through one long life, but narrowing the battles to key moments. The Battle of Borodino is an amazing sequence that details the heights of his military strategy that made Bonaparte feared by everyone in Europe. He’s described as a “Corsican Thug” to which he later crowns himself Emperor. “France was in ruins. I found the Crown of France in the Gutter, and I picked it up with the tip of my sword, and I cleaned it off.’