When “Corsican outlaw” Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) leaves his post in Egypt at the beginning of his ascension to the French throne to confront his new wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) about her indiscretion in his absence, she purrs, “Without for me.” you are nobody. Say it”. And he does it.
He’s a brilliant but irritable military strategist and, in Ridley Scott’s gripping historical epic, an insecure husband who shouts crazy things like, “Fate gave me this lamb chop!” in discussions about Josephine’s fertility at the dinner table. And yet he is always under the spell of this intoxicating woman. Without her, the film shows us, he will end up a nobody, plunged into a lonely death by the Emperor of France and exiled to St. Helena.
From 1793 to 1821 Napoleon like its plot, it is an extremely ambitious film. While it’s great in many ways, it actually tries to cover too many things at once. At its core, this is an exceptionally good war film, centered on a love story that it never manages to realize, and directed by a lead actor who always stays a little out of reach.
Phoenix’s performance is very funny and has a nice quality to it. Black viper about the court of Emperor Napoleon I – but also strangely muted, as if neither Scott nor Phoenix nor screenwriter David Scarpa ever knew exactly what they wanted to say. “I miss you,” Bonaparte says with tears in his eyes to his old regiment, which he is trying to win back after being expelled and, incredibly, it immediately lays down its arms. Why?
Historical purists will be outraged from the start when we meet the young Bonaparte looking approvingly at Marie Antoinette at the guillotine at the height of the French revolutionary fever (he certainly wasn’t there). He and Josephine meet and marry after she seduces him with one The basic Instinct A moment over tea.
In many ways, this is Kirby’s film: she’s cunning and charming, but also desperate, never letting us forget the precariousness of her situation or her strong survival instincts. There’s also some political nonsense and plenty of carefully choreographed battles that are good enough to rival the best fight scenes ever put on screen, including Scott’s own battle in Germany. gladiator (2000).
In Russia, guns drag people under the ice, rivers of blood fill the water, and Cossacks hang corpses from trees; The men stretch for miles along Belgian fields near Waterloo as the Duke of Wellington (a wonderfully sardonic Rupert Everett) looks on. And hundreds of thousands of soldiers die in cruel and inventive ways. Thank God for Apple’s deep pockets. When you have so many real extras, it shows.
As far as entertainment goes, this is a masterful film. If you like watching cannonballs pierce the chest bones of horses, only to have them ripped out of a bloody cave moments later and hurled across the battlefield with the words “for mommy,” then you won’t see anything better this year.
But for some reason the story doesn’t add up. What about his angry mother, his brother, his relationships with his peers? Neither the portrait of Napoleon as a ruthless strategist nor his complex love story with Josephine ever seems complete.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.