Napoleon
What a goddamn nice looking mess. The battle scenes are the best, if you like the Gladiator cold opening repeated several times. The rest can and should be ostracised to Saint Helena, with three officers and 12 servants.
Sold as a serious historical biopic, the tone is all over the place, shifting quickly from farcical shenanings, over speeches regarding armies of hundreds of thousands of souls. I can see they wanted to avoid the stuffiness of an historic biopic, but in that case focus on another guy. Not the bucking bronco that buried the French Revolution, then buried its ideals by crowning himself Emperor, then buried the whole thing again leading to the kings coming back in force.
And the farce continues, perpetuating myths such as his small height, the causes of defeat in Russia, propelling Josephine to stardom (it was the other way around!). He was not that small, for the time, they just had crappier food back then, and he was no aristo. The combined armies of 600 thousand men had plenty of supplies to get to Moscow and back, a couple months from what I can tell, but when the Russian fled the city, Napoleon waited patiently for one month for them to surrender, and when they didn’t, the food ran out. So much for military acumen, his ego got the best of him.
Last, and the most egregious of choices, Rose (Josephine was just Napoleon’s nickname for his girl friend, one of his habits) was a big deal in the new Republic, and Bonaparte was just a random military dude. Just like Barras was banked by Josephine’s connections, Napoleon was propelled to stardom and nice parties by his marriage to an older woman with children, a widower. He had to be pretty charismatic to pull that off, but the film has him furrowing his brow before the crowning.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.