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 Ridley Scott made a 2h38 movie about Napoleon's trademark rutting noises, with a 4h cut (even more grunts) coming to Apple TV in the new year. Joaquin Phoenix plays the Emperor of the French as an aloof weirdo fixated on his sometimes wife Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby, who conquers Europe as an afterthought to their relationship. Historians and the French are mad that it's wildly inaccurate but Scott allayed their fears by telling them all to shut up and it's fine.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:01
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| # ? May 3, 2024 08:03 |
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josh04 posted:Napoleon's rise to power represents a threat not just to the individual leaders he ends up at war with, but to the entire structure of European power at the time. He's literally aiming high. Fangz posted:Weird take then, because revolutionary France is far more scary. Fangz posted:I don't know what you mean. My point is that Napoleon's rise at the time was a marked improvement from the chaotic rule of the revolutionaries and the Directory, who had been at war with everyone for decades. A democracy switching to an Emperor nicely affirmed everyone's monarchist beliefs. He was able to make peace treaties afterwards. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Napoleon's legacy is unquestionably a creation of Revolutionary France and whatever else you can say about him he shattered the ancien regime. Arguably it's the reason Europeans regard him with special horror in the first place. Preferable to a communist but an eternal adversary nevertheless. Yeah, what HUNDU said - despite being preferable to the revolutionary governments Napoleon was still an absolute outsider who seized the throne by force in a way that the great powers of Europe would prefer had remained impossible.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:06
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I liked the part where he winces when he sits on his horse at Waterloo because it subtly reminded me about how he had very bad hemorrhoids during it.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:24
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josh04 posted:Yeah, what HUNDU said - despite being preferable to the revolutionary governments Napoleon was still an absolute outsider who seized the throne by force in a way that the great powers of Europe would prefer had remained impossible. So what's what shooting a cannon at a pyramid symbolises, Napoleon's lack of royal blood?
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Nov 27, 2023 17:09
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He's shooting at the ediface of power, not just the opposing force.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:07
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So they just made Waterloo into a generic Peter Jackson battle eh. IDKS about Waterloo but even I was like "goddamn, is anything about the battle correct?". The camps are just built in artillery range of each other but they don't start shooting until Napoleon says to? And when charged by horses they decide to leave their breastworks? That they have for some reason? Ridley Scott says he doesn't care about making a movie historically accurate, but I mean, history is good? And interesting? And so if you start replacing things whole cloth what you make has to in some way justify it's existence and this movie doesn't pull it off. It's drowning in the vast time span it's trying to cover - 80% of the movie is almost disconnected vignettes hitting on (some version of) some important moment. Like I'm no expert but when Robespierre pulled the gun out I knew what was coming, but it's such a weirdly compressed and altered version of the events, and the movie is moving so quickly that it hasn't spent any time at all developing Robespierre as a character, or setting up the events that are unfolding. You're going to watch scene after scene that's just quick shots of some mangled version of major bullet points of his life. The comparison I keep coming back to is French Forrest Gump. Positives, I think the early parts of the movie are the best; the Siege of Toulon is a fantastic battle scene, and the early bits with Josephine getting out of prison, and that weird, weird party (Feast of the Survivors?) was the kind of surreal social event I'd expect during that period, was that real? Oh, something that really struck me when watching the movie that I haven't seen brought up is how beautiful and ever present the natural and candle lighting is. It really drives home just how different the world looked, in doors, before ubiquitous electric lighting. Everything is both softly lift and directionally lit, and it's like another world, all the paintings from the period started to seem a lot less affected to me while I was watching. Not a good movie, some interesting scenes and beautiful throughout, but the script/structure is a mess, the main character is from a comedy, and there's essentially no narrative or personal relationships. They really, really should have narrowed this down to a more specific point in his life.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:04
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I’m saving myself for the 4 hour cut
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Nov 27, 2023 20:31
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does he say sacrebleu
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Nov 27, 2023 22:32
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He says "you think you're so great just because you have BOATS"
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Nov 27, 2023 23:04
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Experts React videos have destroyed some people's media literacy and the sooner they get the Neil deGrasse Tyson treatment, the better.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:11
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I hope he says “Hon hon hon titty croissants!” during a romantic scene
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Nov 27, 2023 23:13
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It's very silly that people can still get let down by historical inaccuracies in a Ridley Scott movies of all things, but I expected his take to be a bit more interesting than what sounds like recycled anglo stuff and psychosexual drama. Give me something wild.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:19
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It's weird that people can still be let down by Ridley Scott movies, period
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Nov 27, 2023 23:22
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This was Scott's best movie in a while and I'd like to think that Leto and Pacino's bugged out performances in House of Gucci loosened him up.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:26
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I don't know how historically accurate The Last Duel was, but I know it was a much better film. I'm also looking forward to the "let him cook" cut. The movie is still beautiful, and many individual scenes are arresting, so gently caress it show me the longer version and maybe there's a better movie there.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:33
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Saw it (from a balcony seat) on a Cineworld "Superscreen" which is basically their IMAX sized non-IMAX screen (but I'm sure it's bigger than most "LieMAX"s). Anyway, it felt a bit incomplete, I think it suffered by trying to portray so much of his life in 2hr20m, so I'm looking forward to seeing the 4hr cut. The battle scenes that we saw were good, I liked how real the cannon recoil looked, and some good cavalry charges. I think his relationship with Josephine felt underdeveloped - all of a sudden it's 20 years later and they don't look much older - as good as an actress as Vanessa Kirby is, she looks in her 20s for the entirety of the film, while Joaquin just stays middle aged, while it in real life it was rather the opposite. And speaking of Joaquin, as much as I love him and will watch anything he's in, he felt miscast or badly directed - I'm not sure if he was supposed to come across as a comedic character but it didn't really gel well with the more serious war and diplomacy themes. I still had a good time watching it though.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:46
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Jack B Nimble posted:Oh, something that really struck me when watching the movie that I haven't seen brought up is how beautiful and ever present the natural and candle lighting is. It really drives home just how different the world looked, in doors, before ubiquitous electric lighting. Everything is both softly lift and directionally lit, and it's like another world, all the paintings from the period started to seem a lot less affected to me while I was watching. I love Scott for this. I finally watched The Last Duel a few weeks ago and the lighting similarly really stood out for me there. It's mostly outside, but if you haven't seen Scott's first feature film, The Duelists, it's really good, gorgeous looking. And IIRC is a little more historically accurate with what folks are wearing. It's based on a true story about two officers in Napoleon's army but it's just focused on their encounters over the years and not the big picture. Anyway it's a cool flick with a lot of "Huh...I guess those paintings were how it looks irl after all" exterior shots.
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Nov 28, 2023 00:12
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I wasn't sold on the trailers but a lot of the weird criticisms are triggering my contrarian sense so I'm looking forward to seeing this
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Nov 28, 2023 03:24
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Blood Boils posted:I wasn't sold on the trailers but a lot of the weird criticisms are triggering my contrarian sense so I'm looking forward to seeing this "Contrarian" is probably the best way to describe this movie.
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Nov 28, 2023 03:25
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Haven't seen Gucci, alien covanent and Last Duel were excellent, the Martian and All the Money were lame AF . . With sir Ridley you can never be too sure beforehand
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Nov 28, 2023 03:38
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Napoleon is a complete waste of time of a movie whose single positive is that it looks pretty. It is boring and disjointed at best and an insult to intelligence at worst. It's every caricature the British made of Napoleon played straight and then some. The movie is not a compelling examination of the historical Napoleon. The movie does not present an interesting fictionalized Napoleon. What the movie does, is invest the majority of its runtime into making Napoleon look like a completely pathetic, uncharismatic, awkward, borderline idiotic loser. Now, full disclosure, I am not a fan of the historical Napoleon so I have no bias against presenting Napoleon in a bad light. I would absolutely welcome a well-done less-than-flattering depiction of him. But this movie goes about in the most uninteresting way. To evaluate Joaquin Pheonix's performance is tricky and I cannot fault him for the script he has been presented. Napoleon spends the majority of the movie with an expression of vague misery. He barely if ever smiles. His sexual advances towards Josephine are at best extremely awkward and at worst repugnant. He is deeply uncharismatic, in fact, nobody seems to like him. Whenever we get a look at his officers, they look like they put up with him more than anything. Like they are put in a position they didn't want and the person in charge is a complete idiot but they can't say anything. Especially towards the later half of the movie, whenever Napoleon speaks to his officers, a lot of them just get this moment where they look baffled at what they are being told. The movie spends an inordinate amount of time on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine. The core conflict of the movie is how utterly obsessed he is with her. If I could divide the movie between two moving parts, it would be the scenes in France and the scenes of Napoleon on a military campaign. The scenes in France are predominantly about Josephine. The military scenes are full of Napoleon narrating his letters to Josephine, and the majority of them are about how much he misses her and how much he loves her and how it pains him that she isn't writing back. The entire relationship utterly falls flat. There is no chemistry. It's deeply unflattering. The two sex scenes in the movie are there to mock Napoleon for not being able to last more than 5 seconds. He acts weird towards her. Napoleon in this movie has no real ambition besides his obsession with Josephine. He is the almighty idiot, almost stumbling into becoming the most powerful man in France. French Gump is accurate, except that Forrest Gump is actually a good movie. The movie just loves jumping forward in time over and over, and as a result it's unfocused and disjointed. The stakes are never properly set up. But not that it would matter, because the movie spends so much time making Napoleon unlikeable in the most unsatisfying way that you just don't care. When you get to Waterloo you just want it over with. In a better movie, deeply unsympathetic Napoleon losing would evoke feelings of elation, perhaps karmic justice. But the only elation you feel by that point is in knowing that the movie is almost over. Spoiler talk, somewhat disjointed because I talk about details as they come to me: My favourite take in this movie is that Napoleon initiates the Hundred Days because Tsar Alexander visited Josephine and they danced. My second favourite take in the movie is Napoleon from Egypt because he learns he is getting cucked. I mean, for gently caress's sake. How much more ludicrous can this get? The movie just can't stop making Napoleon look like a completely clueless idiot and loser. When he gets to Moscow, he looks completely confused. The entire city is vacant. He spends the night there, then wakes up to find the city burning at night. He looks flabbergasted as his generals tell him that Alexander burned the city down. In the end of the movie, he quizzes a couple of girls about some things. He asks them who burned Moscow down, they tell him Alexander did, and he's like, 'No, I did it!' The scene in the Hundred Days where Napoleon famously recruited the army sent to arrest him is done straight. But it feels completely unearned because, surprise, in a movie that spends the majority of its time making Napoleon as deeply uncharismatic and unliked as possible, a scene an entire army breaks their oath to their king out of loyalty to Napoleon is utterly dissonant. Oh yeah, they decided to sprinkle some Kaiser Willy on Napoleon's personality. He has an inferiority complex towards the British, who, he posits, think they are superior because they have better ships. There's a scene in Egypt where they excavate a Pharaoh and open his sarcophagus. The Pharaoh is too tall for Napoleon, who has to stand on a box to reach the mummy's height. He pokes the mummy and it falls to the side of the sarcophagus. His officers look at him as though saying "What the gently caress are you doing?" As though we needed more hammers to drive the nail home about how utterly lacking in drive Napoleon is, it's not even his idea to become Emperor. Napoleon has weird hang-ups about his mother. Josephine tells him he is nothing without her and his mother, and Napoleon starts acting like an overgrown baby on the verge of tears that his mommy isn't there. The Duke of Wellington is a military genius who has read Napoleon like an open book and completely counters him in Waterloo. The movie ends with an epilogue recounting that 3 million people died in Napoleon's wars. Thanks for the moralizing, I guess. And you're telling me Ridley Scott wants a 4 hour director's cut? What's gonna be in it? More awkward sex scenes? More scenes where Napoleon makes a complete fool of himself? gently caress off Ridley. Suck your own dick elsewhere. Countzer fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 09:16
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Him joking about burning Moscow is one of the few real things in the film. Her name was Betsy Balcombe and they struck up something of a friendship on St Helena.
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Nov 28, 2023 10:48
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It's one of the more subtle bits of storytelling (relatively speaking). Napoleon notes early on that Tsar Alexander has been studying his strategies, kicks his rear end at Austerlitz, gets betrayed by him in their pact against the British, then (in the film) successfully outfoxes him by being willing to burn Moscow to the ground to win, denying Napoleon his victory and provoking him into the bad decision to keep marching. So Napoleon caused it all, even if he didn't set the fire himself.
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Nov 28, 2023 10:57
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Can’t believe someone would moralize about this dear sweet innocent man, who was tall and definitely not cucked.
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Nov 28, 2023 12:32
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Drunkboxer posted:Can’t believe someone would moralize about this dear sweet innocent man, who was tall and definitely not cucked. You can't read for poo poo if that's what you got out of my post. There's plenty enough ways to present Napoleon as a villain. He was a megalomaniac who seized absolute power and thrust Europe into a decade of total war. He reinstuted slavery. He placed his family in thrones of other nations. He betrayed everything the revolution that propped him up stood for. Presenting him as an idiot whose driving force is spreading Josephine's legs is just about the least interesting way to go about, and the movie doesn't work as a black comedy either.
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Nov 28, 2023 13:13
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Countzer posted:You can't read for poo poo if that's what you got out of my post. I think this might have been an interesting subtext, but Ridley Scott decided to make this movie for the subtext free era, so it's now, just the text. There's also a version of this Napoleon that's fine but then they would have to make cartoon versions of all the other people involved, from Alexander to Metternich to Wellington. But, it's too ponderous.
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Nov 28, 2023 14:06
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Wellington in this is only one step removed from Stephen Fry in Blackadder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLSLMIX3P0
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Nov 28, 2023 15:27
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The argument that people who didn't like the movie are only mad because it makes fun of Napoleon is a straw man, the movie's bad. poo poo, I came out of the theater thinking I'd have liked it more of they used the hobbit techniques to make him three feet tall, at least that'd been funny.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:00
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Drunkboxer posted:Can’t believe someone would moralize about this dear sweet innocent man, who was tall and definitely not cucked. Yeah but this kinda stuff is so loving boring dude, you gotta realize that's the crime of it.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:41
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Crespolini posted:Yeah but this kinda stuff is so loving boring dude, you gotta realize that's the crime of it. What I think is boring are big lists of historical inaccuracies in hollywood movies.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:09
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It's not even that Napoleon was cucked. He freely admits that he cheated on her. The crux is that they had a toxic but still deep relationship. And the idea that he has no ambition besides her isn't supported by the text. He seizes power when given an opening, compares himself to Alexander the Great and literally measures himself against pharaohs and escapes Elba to reclaim his throne.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:13
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Drunkboxer posted:What I think is boring are big lists of historical inaccuracies in hollywood movies. Ok man.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:13
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Movie was good. Very enjoyable.josh04 posted:He says "you think you're so great just because you have BOATS" This (among other things) didn't get any laughs out of people at the theater we saw it at. Bunch of humorless freaks.
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Nov 28, 2023 22:03
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Countzer posted:Napoleon is a complete waste of time of a movie whose single positive is that it looks pretty. It is boring and disjointed at best and an insult to intelligence at worst. It's every caricature the British made of Napoleon played straight and then some. See this is what I mean, this sounds like a lot of fun 
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Nov 28, 2023 23:14
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I saw in an imax theater. Very pretty as others have said but it was a total mess that was really poorly cast and directed. It stunk!
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Nov 29, 2023 03:23
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Countzer posted:The Duke of Wellington is a military genius who has read Napoleon like an open book and completely counters him in Waterloo. Then he mets the pretty Pauline Borghese, the french wife of a Roman noble. She even sells him her really good hotel, not far from the Elyssé for 250k+ pounds. Expensive but not that bad. The twist is that she was born Pauline Bonaparte and ran immediatly afterward to Elba with the money, where her brother used it to buy a big boat and a small army. A real genius that Wellington guy. The napoleonic area is full of insanely great people and wanking over Wellington, bitching over Napoleon and centering everything on his most boring wife is the most british thing one can do. Grats for a really british movie, i guess. Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Nov 29, 2023 |
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Nov 29, 2023 11:56
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Toplowtech posted:In 1814, after Napoleon first exile, the duke of Wellington was directed by the British government to acquire a building in Paris so they could have an ambassady. The problem is that a poo poo ton of nobles were back in Paris with the Bourbons, all buying private hotels and the prices of real estate were going insane. I should have known that for the price of some Parisian real estate you could buy a whole ship and crew of pirates instead.
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Nov 29, 2023 12:19
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Said house remains the House of the British Ambassador to this day. Pauline was a real one, only Bonaparte to visit her brother in exile.
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Nov 29, 2023 12:25
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I was entertained. I own the big book about Kubrick's failed Napoleon movie so it was fun to see that come together in a very roundabout way, but aside from seeing his tomb and playing Total War Napoleon I can't claim to be a scholar on the man. And I didn't mind Phoenix's portrayal of him as constantly looking pained and totally lacking in sprezzatura.
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Nov 29, 2023 16:58
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Kubrick's material is being adapted as a miniseries for HBO by Spielberg, supposedly at least. Otherwise keep Kubrick's name out of this when discussing Lesser Scott's trash fire film.
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Nov 29, 2023 20:27
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