Spoilers below.

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Tyler: Norman, look at this behemoth right here.  What’ve we got, exactly?  Tortured romance?  War epic?  History lesson?  It’s a big ol’ swing for the fences, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon.  And it’s a hit!  It topped new Disney animation!  Mercy, what an unexpected phenomenon.

Norman: It topped Wish? Really? Okay, because I took my kids to see Wish the day after seeing Napoleon and thought Wish was the better movie by far!

Honestly, I don’t know what we have here. Three different movies? France. Army. Josephine.

Tyler: Box Office Mojo reports that, over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Wish grossed $31.6 million.  Napoleon: $32.7 million.

Norman: There you have it. Wish was, if nothing else, coherent.

Tyler: I’m guessing it doesn’t open with a brutal gory decapitation, though!

Norman: No! But there is a utopia where people can come to give up their hopes and dreams for fear of never having them realized. It’s weird.

Anyway, Napoleon. Are you up to date on your Napoleonic history?

Tyler: Nah, if I’m a buff about anything it’s American presidents.  Is that a thing for history enthusiasts, though?  A Napoleon phase?

Norman: I wouldn’t know. Ha! I dabble in history, but I’m no Ken Burns.

I came into the movie with a general outline of Napoleon’s life and significance, but not enough to play history bingo. That said, I did have the sense that maybe he didn’t shoot cannons at the pyramids irl.

Tyler: That lunacy.  I saw the movie with a couple of buddies, one of whom actually did go through a phase of reading about Napoleon.  His critical insight post-screening was welcomed.  Like, say, Ridley Scott choosing not to depict the Italian campaign that preceded the army’s arrival in Egypt.  We get a single mention of victory in Italy, in one of those letters-to-Josephine voiceovers.  Per my friend, this is a big deal.

This movie is a mess on so many levels.  And, 150 minutes later, I feel no closer to a solid knowledge and comprehension of Napoleon’s place in history.

Norman: Yes!

But I don’t think Scott wanted to give a history lesson, so the viewer should probably be open to a different kind of experience and go in with a different set of expectations.

Tyler: Telling, I think, is that they’re already pimping a four-hour cut that’ll be streaming next year.  They—Scott, the producers, whoever—know that this final theatrical version is compressed and hacked up.

Norman: Oh I didn’t know that. It is Scott’s way to roll out as many cuts as possible!

Tyler: Thank the cinema gods that he hasn’t touched Alien.

Just make a damn movie, Ridley, stick a final statement.  Don’t hedge your bets with all this variation mishegoss.

Norman: Yes. In the case of Napoleon, I might welcome a longer cut. That feels strange to say of a 150-minute movie, but this movie was so disjointed. I didn’t walk in expecting to come away as a Napoleon expert, but I was hoping for a story that would make some sense, that would at least give me a sense of what Ridley Scott thinks of Napoleon. As it is, the only reason it seems he wanted to make a movie about this great historical figure is that he wanted to film some kick-ass battle scenes.

Tyler: Do they kick ass, though?  I found myself distracted by the gore.  War in reality is gory and horrifying, of course, but here in this movie the bloody obscenity of the violence took me out of the picture.  Those battle scenes are Ridley the showman at work.  I don’t buy his attempt to fold in a—fairly rote—social message about war being terrible.

When those cannonballs plowed through the frozen surface of the lake, filmed from under the water, I was wowed.  What a shot!  So cool!  Doesn’t speak to the abomination of war at all.

Norman: I was just about to say that I was a total sucker for bodies and blood crashing through ice. He might have done too many of those underwater shots, but it didn’t matter, because I was pretty damned impressed!

Tyler: It looked great!

Norman: That’s the thing about Napoleon. There’s a lot of spectacle here. Scott wants things to look cool, he wants to engage the audience at a visceral, visual level. In an interview he brushed aside the cannons on the pyramids scene by basically saying, “Yeah, but it’s more interesting!” And, kind of, I guess.

Tyler: Dumb.  Dumb dumb dumbery.  People have been falling all over biographies of Napoleon for two hundred years.  Ridley Scott’s gonna wander along and just make some shit up like the story doesn’t tell itself?  Fuck outta here.

Norman: It’s disrespectful.

Not because he fudged the history, but becasue he doesn’t even seem to care. What is the point of making a movie about Napoleon if you don’t have something significant to say about him?

Tyler: There it is.  There’s nothing here.  Sympathy?  Condemnation?  Analysis?  I still don’t know anything about who Napoleon was as a person, I didn’t get a sense of the death toll until the postscript, I remain clueless about the battle mastery of a guy who conquered a continent.

But hey, raw and unpleasant sex scenes!  Napoleon’s no good in bed!  Haw!

Norman: That brings us to Joaquin Phoenix. Good actor, yes. Maybe great. But what the hell was going on here? Usually leaders of Napoleon’s stature exhibit some sort of charisma. Hell, even Trump can be weirdly funny and charming when he wants to. Phoenix’s Napoleon was a brute and little more.

I could understand why a man might fall for Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine, but there was nothing attractive about this Napoleon. Also, Phoenix is probably too old for the part, but I’m assuming Scott cast him because they’ve worked together and because he’s a big-name, Oscar-bait type.

Tyler: I wanna know who if anybody could’ve pulled off the role.

Norman: Phoenix, 15 years ago.

Tyler: That permanent scowl.  The dour mien.  No, this old-ass Napoleon is not a conqueror of worlds.  He’s a petulant ass.

“You think you’re so special just because you have boats!”

Norman: The dialogue! What?

Tyler: Josephine’s calculated seduction of Napoleon—“Once you see it, you will always want it”—was not sexy.  It was kinda gross.

Norman: But exactly the kind of thing this Napoleon would be drawn to, I guess.

Tyler: Did the assortment of accents bother you?  I personally didn’t mind Phoenix sticking to a flat American sound, in a kind of classic-Hollywood-epic sense.  Yeah, it’s pretty Prince Of Thieves.  But that’s how they’ve done it for 120 years now.

I do get annoyed when a movie where everyone in a foreign country is speaking English, only to have the bad guys—or whatever—be subtitled.  Pick one or the other.

Norman: It took me a second to get used to Phoenix’s accent, but I forgot about it quickly. Accents don’t matter much to me unless they are egregiously bad.

There was one thing I liked about Napoleon – the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine. I was especially taken with the tension between the two on the issue of an heir.

Tyler: See, I grew weary of the melodrama.  I don’t doubt the veracity of what’s depicted.  I just wanted more war and strategy.  Which, again, undercuts Scott’s desire to tell us how bad war is.

Norman: Interesting. I might have been happy with a movie only about the two of them. The French history and the battlefield was so nonsensical that I got bored quickly. But relationships are my game.

Tyler: Oh, I’m all about relationships and depictions of profound human connection.  I immediately think of my affection for Richard Linklater’s Before… trilogy.  I just found the dynamic between Napoleon and Josephine to be so toxic, so miserable, that it was unpleasant to watch.

Norman: It needed to be fleshed out, for sure. I don’t mind a miserable on-screen relationship as long as it illuminates something true and human about relationships in the real world.

Tyler: We do have one of their fights to thank for the line and delivery “I enjoy my meals.”  I’ll give this movie that moment.

Back to your point, regarding the heir.  Pretty creepy, Napoleon’s mother ushering him down the hall to a concubine.

Norman: Yes! And that’s the kind of scene that I find compelling. Not enjoyable, per se, but the kind of dynamic that grabs my attention.

Tyler: I’ll give the movie that.  My attention didn’t lag.

Norman: Have I told you that I hate biopics?

Tyler: Most of them, yeah, just string together Big Important Moments while taking wild guesses about dialogue and interpersonal relationships.  They’re all-too-often Oscar bait.  They fail the genuine essence of the true characters they depict.

Norman: In almost every case they bite off far more than they can chew. The only way out is to focus on a narrow part of a person’s life. Selma is a good example. It doesn’t try to tell us the entire story of MLK’s life, but by focusing on Selma and the events leading up to it gave me a sense of his significance and gave the movie some narrative structure.

Tyler: I’ve long thought that a biographical Beatle movie would work if the filmmakers selected a handful of moments, famous or not, that would allow the narrative space to examine the relationships, not just the fanfare.

I guess Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs kind of went that route.  That’s a movie I generally forget exists.

Speaking of Joaquin Phoenix biopics: “You can’t walk no line!”

Norman: Didn’t see Steve Jobs.

Napoleon is the bad kind of biopic. Paint by numbers, doesn’t add up. All of which is made worse by a bland, frustrating central performance. A longer cut might help, but I’ve already invested enough time.

Tyler: Oh, yeah, no.  I will not be watching the “final final cut” or whatever.

We’ve really taken this thing to the woodshed, man.

Norman: It deserves this treatment.

Tyler: Ice cold.  Fuck this movie.

Norman: While watching Napoleon I recalled one of my great moviegoing regrets. In 2008 or so I considered flying to San Francisco to see a triptych print of Able Gance’s Napoleon (1927). All five hours and thirty minutes. I should have gone.

Tyler: Oh wow.  That sounds spectacular.

Norman: It’s supposed to be a towering masterpiece, but impossible to watch on home video and only one theater capable of showing a print.

Instead I’ve seen Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Sigh.

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