BRUCE BAWER: Napoleon: Full of Sound and Fury — But Signifying What?

All artists are at the mercy of timing. Sometimes it benefits them, sometimes not. The fact that Napoleon opened just a few weeks after the monstrosities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 is unfortunate for Scott, not least because his movie begins with a horribly grisly depiction of the guillotining of Marie Antoinette that can’t help reminding you of the decapitations in the kibbutzim and at that dance party in the Negev. And Marie Antoinette, as it turns out, isn’t the only one to lose her head in this film.

To watch Napoleon is to be aghast at his transcontinental butchery — and to ponder his motives. Historians write about his eagerness to spread the French Revolution, topple monarchies, and create a United States of Europe characterized by liberty, equality, and fraternity. But Scott doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in such matters and doesn’t strain to address the obvious contradictions. (Why, for example, would a principled enemy of royalty want to found a dynasty?)

So why did Scott make this picture? Simply to offer a spectacle of sheer savagery on an unimaginable scale? If you’ve seen his earlier work, you know he’s drawn to gore. Yes, Napoleon is better than last year’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, but in Scott’s film, unlike Edward Berger’s, there’s never any suggestion that we’re expected to be appalled at the extraordinary and meaningless loss of human life. On the contrary, the idea seems to be to impress us with Napoleon’s mastery of (as the Military History and Atlas put it) the military art.

“So why did Scott make this picture?” Several scenes play like homages to Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon, which itself used the research that Kubrick had banked before MGM pulled the plug on his production of Napoleon. Scott really does seem to want to say that after his modest 1977 film The Duellists, itself inspired by Lyndon, that he’s finally topped the Maestro after all these years. He hasn’t, but it’s tough to fault him for wanting to aim high.

Related: The Critical Drinker wanted to like Napoleon, but is similarly confused by what Scott was hoping to accomplish with his new movie: