Napoleon was a bad movie, but it was a bad movie of a specific kind that is quite rare. It is probably a disadvantage when it comes to enjoying this film to come to it with a high degree of historical knowledge. From the opening scene–which takes place in 1793 even though it is labeled as 1789–the film manages to play fast and loose with chronology in its portrayal of the life of Napoleon. Large amounts of historical matters are left out, and the film still ends up two and a half hours long–the film doesn’t deal with Napoleon’s relationships with his siblings as rulers of other parts of Europe, it skips the naval conflict, though it portrays Napoleon as insecure about British naval power, it claims that Napoleon took over Italy without a fight while also listing Marengo (one of the more notable Italian battles) in the killed that Napoleon is accountable for, it connects Napoleon’s rash deeds like leaving Egypt and Ebla to the behavior of Josephine and his insecurity about her faithfulness to him, it avoids campaigns like the 1806 campaign against Prussia, the 1809 Wagram campaign, or the entire period between the end of the Russian invasion and his first abdication from power in 1814, and those were just the more obvious examples of where the movie skips over important matters without explanation or context.

When I was watching the film, it struck me that Ridley Scott, who has made some great historical films before (see the long version of Kingdom of Heaven) seems to have made this film under the mistaken but pervasive notion that Barry Lydon needed to be updated as a 21st century film set in the Napoleon era about the titular dictator and his foppishness. It’s easy to see how French people would not appreciate this film, seeing as it is lacking a cast that is heavy with French people despite the fact that Napoleon’s career was pretty solidly based in and around that area. It is easy to see how military historians are going to be put off by the terrible battles that are shown which give little hint of how the battles actually went and how it was that Napoleon was a genius at war. Instead of a sensible way of portraying the horrors of Napoleonic wars, we get a lot of posturing and cringeworthy dialogue where the dictator has insincere dialogue about wanting peace and doing everything for the well-being of France and lacking ambition, all of which are obviously false.

Unlike with Kingdom of Heaven, there probably isn’t a 4 hour director’s cut that would make sense of this nightmarish portrayal of Napoleon as someone who combines a total lack of social graces or apparent sense of humor with someone whose passionate and romantic side is highly cringeworthy in the extreme. The way he bawls crying while his step-daughter explains that his personal letters to his friend and ex-wife were stolen by a valet and sold, many of which end up being the more laughable parts of the movie in the two characters trying to bully each other through sexual manipulation is especially regrettable. This includes the two sex scenes in the film, which are especially bad, not least because they are wholly unnecessary to anything artistic or narrative in nature, and simply show Napoleon as an embarrassing example of a one-minute man who thinks he is far better at lovemaking than he actually is, which did not need to be seen. Napoleon fails as a historical film largely because Ridley Scott has attempted to make an anti-war and anti-heroic film about one of the most indisputable examples of a warrior hero in the historical record, without showing any understanding of Napoleon as a man or as a general.