Napoleon was not short

 I can understand the rash of negative reviews on Ridley Scott's Napoleon movie currently in theaters. I went to see it last night. 

I am no expert on Napoleon, but I would wager I know more about that period than the average bear. I have studied the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutionary period quite a bit, not to mention the Emperor himself. The film condenses about two decades into a few hours, and that means a lot needs to be left out. The movie segues from one event to another without any context. In one scene the Corsican is defeating the British at Toulon, the next leveling canon at a Royalist uprising, then immediately we see Napolean in Egypt. There is nothing to describe what happened to bring each of these seemingly disjointed events about.  

I will not criticize the battle scenes as many a reviewer has; they are of course wildly inaccurate. For starters the Napoleonic Armies attacked in column, not line. But the point of the movie was not to show a military history, the battles are part of the narrative, not the story. If you want great battle scenes from the era, watch the 1970 epic Waterloo staring Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer. 

In the end, the movie does not know what it should be. Perhaps Scott should have called the film Napoleon and Josephine, that is seemingly what the movie is about; the relationship between the two. Except then how do you account for the exposition on the Reign of Terror? I think Scott had more movie than he could fit in the allotted, already long, timeslot. I have no doubt a lot of context was left on the cutting room floor. This should have been a series, not a movie.

How do you tell the story of Napoleon in a single movie? He was perhaps the most charismatic leader ever born. He was a military genius, an organizational mastermind, a political savant, and an administrator of excellence. Parts of the Napoleonic code remain law today. He gave us the metric system. The way he organized armies remained the blueprint for a hundred years, used by friend and foe equally. His tactics survived in many armies right up until the advent of modern weapons (and proved a disaster for the French in both the Franco-Prussian War and WWI). 

There has never been an equal to the Corsican Upstart, and perhaps never will. It is no wonder an effort to capture the man in a simple movie is a failure.