I love big movies and am looking forward to it. I've read some of the UK reviews, which have been mixed, but I still want to see it, and it's at my local theater, including in IMAX.
As you've said, the Abel Gance film is one of the all-time masterpieces. I'll never forget seeing it at Radio City Music Hall, in 1981, with a live orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola. I later saw a version of it in London, on television, so not ideal, but the magnificence still came through.
Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Epic yes, but IMO the film had no soul. Phoenix and Kirby are terribly miscast with zero charisma.
Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
I haven't seen a lot of Ridley Scott films, but I'm not a great fan. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I didn't even like Alien that much (there are better films about aliens on spaceships); and I found Bladerunner to be a big bore, to use your term, "the film had no soul."
I think Phoenix's best performance is as the Abbé du Coulmier in Quills (2000).
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nakanosunplaza
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Allhallowsday
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Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Yet he gave us the wonderful Feminist statement, THELMA AND LOUISE.Swithin wrote: ↑November 23rd, 2023, 8:13 amI haven't seen a lot of Ridley Scott films, but I'm not a great fan. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I didn't even like Alien that much (there are better films about aliens on spaceships); and I found Bladerunner to be a big bore, to use your term, "the film had no soul."...
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Allhallowsday
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Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
And it looks boring...Nellie LaRoy wrote: ↑November 23rd, 2023, 7:55 pm No one is going to mistake Scott's Napoleon for a feminist statement.
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CinemaInternational
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Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Although he did a fine job directing that, much of the credit for that one should go to the script and its leads (Geena Davis has written afterwards that Sarandon taught her to be more of a feminist and improved her life while making that film, and you honestly can feel both she and her character both expanding the longer the film goes on). Scott had originally signed on to that one only as a producer, but slid into the director's chair when he decided he really wanted to work with Sarandon and Davis personally.Allhallowsday wrote: ↑November 23rd, 2023, 1:34 pmYet he gave us the wonderful Feminist statement, THELMA AND LOUISE.Swithin wrote: ↑November 23rd, 2023, 8:13 amI haven't seen a lot of Ridley Scott films, but I'm not a great fan. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I didn't even like Alien that much (there are better films about aliens on spaceships); and I found Bladerunner to be a big bore, to use your term, "the film had no soul."...
Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Fascinating article about Napoleon in his various adaptations, in today's FT. Here's a clip. I'll try to figure out how to share the whole article. It's by Simon Schama, a respected British historian.
"Ridley Scott's not-half-bad epic stars Joaquin Phoenix and his saturnine mumble, periodically punctuated with heavy breathing or aggravated yelping. But Phoenix's performance, swinging between clenched rumination and neurotic energy, nails what the historian Georges Lefebvre thought was Napoleon's mainspring: the mercurial, dynamic temperament. Moreover, Phoenix's vocal manner is a big improvement on both Marlon Brando's adenoidal lisp in Désirée (1954) and Rod Steiger's strangulated barking in Sergei Bondarchuk's otherwise gripping Waterloo of 1970."
"Ridley Scott's not-half-bad epic stars Joaquin Phoenix and his saturnine mumble, periodically punctuated with heavy breathing or aggravated yelping. But Phoenix's performance, swinging between clenched rumination and neurotic energy, nails what the historian Georges Lefebvre thought was Napoleon's mainspring: the mercurial, dynamic temperament. Moreover, Phoenix's vocal manner is a big improvement on both Marlon Brando's adenoidal lisp in Désirée (1954) and Rod Steiger's strangulated barking in Sergei Bondarchuk's otherwise gripping Waterloo of 1970."
Re: Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)
Here's a bit more from the FT article. This is only a fraction of a very long article which also dealt with books and paintings related to Napoleon.
Napoleon and the mythmakers
From Jacques-Louis David’s canvases to Ridley Scott’s new biopic, the French emperor has long exerted a magnetic pull over artists. What is it that tempts so many to risk a creative Waterloo?
By Simon Schama
Ridley Scott’s not-half-bad epic stars Joaquin Phoenix and his saturnine mumble, periodically punctuated with heavy breathing or aggravated yelping. But Phoenix’s performance, swinging between clenched rumination and neurotic energy, nails what the historian Georges Lefebvre thought was Napoleon’s mainspring: the mercurial, dynamic temperament. Moreover, Phoenix’s vocal manner is a big improvement on both Marlon Brando’s adenoidal lisp in Désirée (1954) and Rod Steiger’s strangulated barking in Sergei Bondarchuk’s otherwise gripping Waterloo of 1970.
It may well be that the challenge of reproducing the vox Napoleana (the tone of which historical sources are strangely quiet about) is possibly best met by the captions of silent movies such as Abel Gance’s histrionically unhinged masterpiece of 1927. You have to wonder, though, what Jack Nicholson, picked by Stanley Kubrick for his unrealised biopic, would have sounded like.
It takes Napoleonic self-confidence to take on the subject, since commercially, until now, the most ambitious movies have all met a commercial Waterloo. After Gance’ savant-garde, manic-expressionist, five-hour movie was met by more head-scratching than public applause, he was denied the funding to achieve his heart’s desire of making a further five films taking Napoleon all the way to exile on St Helena.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s literally stunning Borodino in the Soviet-era War and Peace is still the most convincing cinematic representation of what it feels like to be trapped inside a battle, a challenge since the ttwo most salient characteristics, as John Keegan’s The Face of Battle pointed out — invisibility (the smoke) and inaudibility (the thunder of cannon) — are not audience-friendly. Inevitably, the budget-busting, seven-hour Tolstoy movie was shut down by its Soviet producers before its proper conclusion, short-changing the incineration of Moscow. The disaster did not, however, preclude Bondarchuk being hired to direct Waterloo (with a fabulously droll Christopher Plummer as Wellington), complete with 15,000 extras and 200 cavalry horses, a movie so commercially disastrous that it played a part in the studios’ reluctance to go anywhere near Kubrick’s looming monster.
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in cultural psychology to notice that all these heavy-hitters were not just making films about Napoleon so much as climbing into his saddle, beguiled by the siren song of Movie Destiny.
Gance used the history to create a cinematic revolution, one that deployed an artillery barrage of effects — handheld cameras (unique for silent movies), cameras mounted on pendulums, wildly rapid cutting and the triple-screen opening of the final scene of the French army poised to descend on Italy — all intended to strong-arm the audience into becoming part of the action. At first sight, Kubrick damned the experimentally operatic film as “terrible”, although the impression lingered long enough for him to want to beat it by directing “the best movie ever made”.
To those who, late in his career, asked Kubrick whether he might think of reviving his own Napoleon project, abandoned around 1970, the maestro insisted he had never really wanted to make the film; and, perversely, that there never had been a shooting script. But when that script and the monumental archive of its development were unearthed, the scale of Kubrick’s attack of Napoleon syndrome became breathtakingly apparent.
Betwteen 30,000 and 50,000 extras, supplied by the Romanian army, were to have been transported to locations by a fleet of 1,000 trucks. Two years of obsessive research generated a library of 18,000 documents, many of which Kubrick had pored over, and a cache of 15,000 pictures. Lenses were to be procured that could shoot in available light (as they would for the majestic Barry Lyndon a few years later). Love scenes were to be lit only by candles, glimmering on floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall mirrors that Kubrick thought were Napoleon’s thing: Versailles, only pornier.
At other times, Kubrick was obsessed by historical accuracy to the point of wanting to shoot battles on the locations where they had actually taken place. Disappointed to discover that many of them had long been built over, he collected soil samples to scatter over alternative sites. For all this, his estimated budget — between $3mn and $6mn, chicken feed now but hefty then — was less than the $10mn spent on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had recovered its costs and more. But the scale of everything still frightened MGM off and Kubrick went to Warner Bros to make A Clockwork Orange instead, adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, who also wrote the brilliantly mischievous Napoleon Symphony.
The dark side of what Napoleon wrought is not, of course, good box office. Although Ridley Scott is a dab hand at rendering the spectacle of extreme violence — a horse eviscerated by a cannonball — the pathos of the humble is not his thing. Only one film that I know of — Yves Angelo’s wonderful Le Colonel Chabert (1994), based on a Balzac novella in which an officer presumed dead at Eylau returns to attempt to claim his property and wife — gives full weight to the wretched aftermath of a great battle. Against an infernal landscape of death, the carcasses of horses being cremated in bonfires, the grimy hands of scavengers tug and pull inside the uniforms of the dead to retrieve anything that might be worth having, while Beethoven’s “Ghost” trio plays unbearably over the pitiless desolation.
Professorial carping over liberties taken with the historical facts is beside the point, and Scott for that matter doesn't take that many of them. Joséphine’s stumpy black teeth were never likely to feature in the come-hither mouth of Vanessa Kirby, who does a mean job of inhabiting the empire-line cougar. A bigger pity is the presumption, belied by movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, that provoking an audience to reflect on history’s big questions must necessarily be a drag on entertainment.
Napoleon and the mythmakers
From Jacques-Louis David’s canvases to Ridley Scott’s new biopic, the French emperor has long exerted a magnetic pull over artists. What is it that tempts so many to risk a creative Waterloo?
By Simon Schama
Ridley Scott’s not-half-bad epic stars Joaquin Phoenix and his saturnine mumble, periodically punctuated with heavy breathing or aggravated yelping. But Phoenix’s performance, swinging between clenched rumination and neurotic energy, nails what the historian Georges Lefebvre thought was Napoleon’s mainspring: the mercurial, dynamic temperament. Moreover, Phoenix’s vocal manner is a big improvement on both Marlon Brando’s adenoidal lisp in Désirée (1954) and Rod Steiger’s strangulated barking in Sergei Bondarchuk’s otherwise gripping Waterloo of 1970.
It may well be that the challenge of reproducing the vox Napoleana (the tone of which historical sources are strangely quiet about) is possibly best met by the captions of silent movies such as Abel Gance’s histrionically unhinged masterpiece of 1927. You have to wonder, though, what Jack Nicholson, picked by Stanley Kubrick for his unrealised biopic, would have sounded like.
It takes Napoleonic self-confidence to take on the subject, since commercially, until now, the most ambitious movies have all met a commercial Waterloo. After Gance’ savant-garde, manic-expressionist, five-hour movie was met by more head-scratching than public applause, he was denied the funding to achieve his heart’s desire of making a further five films taking Napoleon all the way to exile on St Helena.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s literally stunning Borodino in the Soviet-era War and Peace is still the most convincing cinematic representation of what it feels like to be trapped inside a battle, a challenge since the ttwo most salient characteristics, as John Keegan’s The Face of Battle pointed out — invisibility (the smoke) and inaudibility (the thunder of cannon) — are not audience-friendly. Inevitably, the budget-busting, seven-hour Tolstoy movie was shut down by its Soviet producers before its proper conclusion, short-changing the incineration of Moscow. The disaster did not, however, preclude Bondarchuk being hired to direct Waterloo (with a fabulously droll Christopher Plummer as Wellington), complete with 15,000 extras and 200 cavalry horses, a movie so commercially disastrous that it played a part in the studios’ reluctance to go anywhere near Kubrick’s looming monster.
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in cultural psychology to notice that all these heavy-hitters were not just making films about Napoleon so much as climbing into his saddle, beguiled by the siren song of Movie Destiny.
Gance used the history to create a cinematic revolution, one that deployed an artillery barrage of effects — handheld cameras (unique for silent movies), cameras mounted on pendulums, wildly rapid cutting and the triple-screen opening of the final scene of the French army poised to descend on Italy — all intended to strong-arm the audience into becoming part of the action. At first sight, Kubrick damned the experimentally operatic film as “terrible”, although the impression lingered long enough for him to want to beat it by directing “the best movie ever made”.
To those who, late in his career, asked Kubrick whether he might think of reviving his own Napoleon project, abandoned around 1970, the maestro insisted he had never really wanted to make the film; and, perversely, that there never had been a shooting script. But when that script and the monumental archive of its development were unearthed, the scale of Kubrick’s attack of Napoleon syndrome became breathtakingly apparent.
Betwteen 30,000 and 50,000 extras, supplied by the Romanian army, were to have been transported to locations by a fleet of 1,000 trucks. Two years of obsessive research generated a library of 18,000 documents, many of which Kubrick had pored over, and a cache of 15,000 pictures. Lenses were to be procured that could shoot in available light (as they would for the majestic Barry Lyndon a few years later). Love scenes were to be lit only by candles, glimmering on floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall mirrors that Kubrick thought were Napoleon’s thing: Versailles, only pornier.
At other times, Kubrick was obsessed by historical accuracy to the point of wanting to shoot battles on the locations where they had actually taken place. Disappointed to discover that many of them had long been built over, he collected soil samples to scatter over alternative sites. For all this, his estimated budget — between $3mn and $6mn, chicken feed now but hefty then — was less than the $10mn spent on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had recovered its costs and more. But the scale of everything still frightened MGM off and Kubrick went to Warner Bros to make A Clockwork Orange instead, adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, who also wrote the brilliantly mischievous Napoleon Symphony.
The dark side of what Napoleon wrought is not, of course, good box office. Although Ridley Scott is a dab hand at rendering the spectacle of extreme violence — a horse eviscerated by a cannonball — the pathos of the humble is not his thing. Only one film that I know of — Yves Angelo’s wonderful Le Colonel Chabert (1994), based on a Balzac novella in which an officer presumed dead at Eylau returns to attempt to claim his property and wife — gives full weight to the wretched aftermath of a great battle. Against an infernal landscape of death, the carcasses of horses being cremated in bonfires, the grimy hands of scavengers tug and pull inside the uniforms of the dead to retrieve anything that might be worth having, while Beethoven’s “Ghost” trio plays unbearably over the pitiless desolation.
Professorial carping over liberties taken with the historical facts is beside the point, and Scott for that matter doesn't take that many of them. Joséphine’s stumpy black teeth were never likely to feature in the come-hither mouth of Vanessa Kirby, who does a mean job of inhabiting the empire-line cougar. A bigger pity is the presumption, belied by movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, that provoking an audience to reflect on history’s big questions must necessarily be a drag on entertainment.