Okay, It Was Bad

Bataille d'Iéna. 14 octobre 1806
Horace Vernet

So I finally went to the theater to watch Ridley Scott's Napoleon, I was prepared to be underwhelmed, yet I still had some hopes of the film at least being entertaining.

It was not.

Some scenes were well done, the setting, the atmosphere of the Revolution seemed accurate. Ridley Scott, in my mind, has always been very good at setting the scene. The Last Duel felt like medieval times, The Duellists, also set in the Napoleonic Era (and a far better film than Napoleon), felt right in depicting that time.

The history in this film is terrible, absolutely terrible. Trenches at Waterloo? The rain stopping just before the attack? Napoléon on horseback in hand to hand combat with infantry? Preposterous.

Even though the terrain in Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo was exaggerated way out of scale, it appears the folks who chose the setting for Waterloo in this film paid absolutely no attention to what the battlefield actually looked like.

Messengers having two horses, one they're riding and the other they're leading was shown in the film, but only at Waterloo. Really? I get the idea, having a spare mount, but it didn't work that way. Messengers rode hard and fast, leading an extra horse would make that hard to do. At any rate, that's the first I've ever heard of such a thing.

Sending multiple messengers along different routes, that's how it was done. Poor subalterns weren't expected to lead another horse while they galloped about.

One more thing, the Prussians finally show up in the film, about nine years too late, and they come in on Wellington's right flank, not his left. Couldn't even be bothered to get that right. (And again, bloody trenches!)

Oh yes, apologies should be offered to Spain as well, they had a major hand in Napoléon's downfall, they aren't even mentioned in the film

If the Waterloo depicted in the film was bad, the battle of Austerlitz was worse. Napoléon's achievement in driving his troops from the Channel coast to the northeast of Vienna, in winter, convincing the Austrians and Russians that his army was strung out and tired was a brilliant strategic achievement.

In the movie, Napoléon draws the enemy onto a frozen lake, then bombards it, destroying the enemy. (The Satschan pond was real, legend has it that the French did breakup the ice as the Russians and Austrians retreated across it causing many of the enemy to drown. Some historians question whether or not it happened to that extent.)

And who in the film crew though that armies used so many effing tents? There's a whole bloody village of tents at Austerlitz and a regular campground at Waterloo.

The French and Variety got it right. An awful, awful movie.

Dear me, they even got Napoléon's birthday wrong!

I wouldn't give the bloody thing half a star out of five. Definitely not worth your time.