'Napoleon' liked, disliked ...or ...has Ridley Scott Lost the Ability to Make Great Movies?
POSTED BY: JAYNEZTOWN
UPDATED: Monday, January 13, 2025 18:41
VIEWED: 2443
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Because he made so many classics I feel he deserves his own thread outside the Hollywood crashing box office threads. So far the film has grossed $83.7 million worldwide and received mixed reviews from critics and fans of movies, it has British actors, Welsh acting roles. American actors and a lot of Arab North Africans but not as many French as you might expect in a French movie. Some budget news said $130 but it might have cost as much as 200+ million or more. Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, it seems to be a badly edited 'Love Story' while his entire life plays on the screen with Vanessa Kirby as Empress Joséphine, an Algeria French guy pTahar Rahim acts as Paul Barras a politician, Youssef Kerkour as Marshal Davout, Ridley Scott has a lot of historical inaccuracy in the film such as Napoleon trying to blow up the Pyramids of Egypt, Davide Tucci as Lazare Hoche, it has a British African Kenyan playing a General Revolutionary, Ian McNeice as Louis XVIII.
we have commentary on it already
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Damn...
Sorry Joaquin. Your Napoleon movie cost $200 Million to make and is going in the Highbrow Heap of failures right on top of Killers of the Flower Moon. These budgets are stupid, and I'm quite certain that the failure of this movie is not going to be any fault of your own.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The choice for watching Napoleon - either the shorter version at the movies or the 4-hour-long version at home which, hopefully, expands on truncated story arcs and underdeveloped characters:
the movie predictions topics
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I'm not a huge fan of any of these "Historical Biopics" myself.
They're all "Based on a True Story", like Fire in the Sky or Fargo was.
Is it any wonder why Jada Pinkett Smith couldn't figure out why everybody raged against black Cleopatra? All of these things have a couple of truths sprinkled into the vast seas of artistic liberty.
Other than that, I'm not commenting on the quality of the film at all. I'm just saying that these budgets for movies like Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon are insanity.
In any other case, the fact that Napoleon took 2nd place and beat Disney's 100th Anniversary cartoon on their opening weekend would have been cause to celebrate. But it's going to end up not even making its Production Budget back worldwide, let alone the $500k it needs to break even.
Supposedly Amazon or Apple or whoever was really behind this doesn't care when they put this big money down because it will make money on their streaming platforms. I don't know how to verify these claims or strike them down. We know Disney+ loses money every quarter for Disney, but Amazon's Prime service covers a lot more than just streaming, and I never hear anything about Apple's business.
If they got a plan, then great.
But Disney always lies about having a plan and they're finally going down.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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“c'est fini ” ??
it looks like
Godzilla, Beyonce and Hunger Games beat Napoleon
The Shift, Trolls, Silent Night and Wish are eating into Napoleon profits?
Some reports say Napoleon is in big trouble, its box office is in free fall and might fall down behind a superhero flop called 'The Marvels', Killers of the Flower Moon, Five Nights at Freddy’s and fall behind a Hindi-Bollywood India movie called Animal (2023)
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JoBlo liked 'the Last Duel' and says Napoleon is 'great'
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Movie Review: What Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon' Gets Wrong About War
By Franz-Stefan Gady | December 2, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/02/napoleon-ridley-scott-review-movi
e-battle-military-historical-accuracy-myth/
I’m just a defense analyst, so I’ll leave a proper critique of Ridley Scott’s new blockbuster biopic Napoleon to the many reviewers who have already disparaged it. I, for one, found it to be a lukewarm mélange of battle scenes and romantic vignettes, leaving me with neither a sense of the man Napoleon Bonaparte — the bicorne-hatted soldier-turned-emperor of the French — nor a feel for the age of upheaval he so much defined. For a grand piece of historical fiction from the director of such masterpieces as Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Black Hawk Down, the film curiously fails to entertain.
My perspective on Napoleon is a different one. Scott’s film stands in a long line of movies, novels, and even history books that have given the world an entirely wrong view of how wars are fought — and even more importantly, how they are won. And that matters, because the mythical idea of war embedded in Napoleon and so many other works has become so widespread in our culture and discourse that it ends up informing actual decisions about actual wars.
Let’s call it the decisive battle myth. Napoleon, with its focus on famous battles such as those of Austerlitz and Waterloo, perpetuates the dangerous idea that wars are decided by great and bloody clashes. This obsession is as old as there have been written accounts of history, but in popular culture in the English-speaking world, the myth can be traced back to the 1851 publication of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, which helped kickstart an entire genre of works focusing on battles supposed to have singlehandedly changed the course of history. In film, think of The Longest Day, Midway, and Stalingrad; in books, the list of battle histories and battle fiction is too long to contemplate. The genre even plays in counterfactuals: The 1993 movie Gettysburg, based on Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, suggests that the South could have won the U.S. Civil War had the Battle of Gettysburg gone the other way.
No matter what these works have taught us to think, the decisive battle is a myth. Wars between major powers are not decided by great battles but by attrition of soldiers and materiel, which in turn is determined by such things as force size, logistics, production, and technology. Battles, large and small, are important only to the extent to which they accelerate attrition and wear down the other side. Yet the myth of the decisive battle — the idea that an adversary can be defeated in one big and bloody but short engagement — remains powerful. It’s also dangerous, because it affects not only ordinary moviegoers but military and political leaders as well. In other words, the very people deciding whether to start and how to fight a war.
Scott’s focus on battles is hardly surprising. Napoleon fought numerous campaigns culminating in big set-piece battles, after which the defeated side sought peace; at the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon defeated the allied armies of Austria and Russia, forcing the former to sue for peace and the latter to retreat home. But the French emperor’s most celebrated victory was only an episode in a long war that did not end until 10 years later, after attrition and mutual exhaustion. The Battle of Waterloo concluded a war that had raged for 23 years, ended French attempts to dominate Europe, and destroyed Napoleon's imperial power forever.
The focus on decisive battles orchestrated by a brilliant military leader such as Napoleon has been poisoning Western military thinking for centuries by suggesting that great power wars can be short affairs. The idea that an adversary can be decisively beaten in just one or a few engagements has incentivized political and military gambling: Think of the German Schlieffen Plan that bet on a single, de
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Quote:'Godzilla' is suppose to be pretty good.
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
“c'est fini ” ??
it looks like
Godzilla, Beyonce and Hunger Games beat Napoleon
The Shift, Trolls, Silent Night and Wish are eating into Napoleon profits?
Some reports say Napoleon is in big trouble, its box office is in free fall and might fall down behind a superhero flop called 'The Marvels', Killers of the Flower Moon, Five Nights at Freddy’s and fall behind a Hindi-Bollywood India movie called Animal (2023)
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The US Domestic numbers are terrible, international $91 Mil
https://forums.boxofficetheory.com/topic/31813-napoleon-909m-overseas-
1366m-ww/
I might watch
'A History Teacher Discusses Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)'
instead
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"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI
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I'm pretty sure that my prediction Napoleon would flop at the box office predated any of the media stating that it would, just like my prediction that Killers of the Flower Moon would flop predated any of the media saying it would.
Again, I never made the claim that either of these movies were bad. There's a lot of talent attached to each of them.
It's the budgets. Gotta do something about those budgets.
We're living in Bidenflation land now. Half the folk in the country can't even pay the bills for what they need to live anymore. $50 date night or $150 family outings to the movie theaters aren't going to be happening that much anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Angry poor white trash have never gone to movies very much. Nowadays, rich people don't go because the movies are available for free a month after the premiere at theaters. And Napoleon (the movie) is unlike the historic Napoleon who was a fascinating villain, but Ridley Scott and Hollywood won’t let you see him:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're living in Bidenflation land now. Half the folk in the country can't even pay the bills for what they need to live anymore. $50 date night or $150 family outings to the movie theaters aren't going to be happening that much anymore.
https://theconversation.com/the-napoleon-that-ridley-scott-and-hollywo
od-wont-let-you-see-218878
Bonaparte had assumed power as first consul of France – and had made it his mission to “annihilate the government of the Blacks” in Saint-Domingue so he could bring back slavery.
In January 1802, Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with tens of thousands of French troops.
Bonaparte’s instructions?
Arrest Louverture and reinstate slavery.
The fall of Louverture
One of the film’s writers, David Scarpa, said Napoléon represents for him “the classic example of the benevolent dictator.”
If that Napoléon ever did exist, Louverture never met him.
In June 1802, Napoléon’s army arrested Louverture and deported him to France. As Louverture wasted away in a French prison, Bonaparte refused to put Louverture on trial. Throughout his incarceration, the guards at the jail denied Louverture food, water, heat and medical care. Louverture subsequently starved and froze to death.
With Louverture gone, Napoléon’s army operated with more bloodlust than ever before. In addition to conventional weapons, his troops fought the freedom fighters with floating gas chambers, mass drownings and dog attacks – all in the name of restoring slavery.
The Black freedom fighters, now calling themselves the armée indigène, led by Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, definitively defeated French forces in the historic Battle of Vertières on Nov. 18, 1803. On Jan. 1, 1804, they officially declared independence from France and changed the name of the island to Haiti.
‘A fatal move’
If the filmmakers had included Napoléon’s failed mission to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, it could have served as a propitious moment to tie the movie back to one of its only coherent arcs: Napoléon’s undying love for Joséphine de Beauharnais, his first wife.
In one memorable scene in the film, Joséphine tells Bonaparte that he is nothing without her, and he agrees.
Joséphine de Beauharnais advised Napoléon to let Saint-Domingue operate as a semi-autonomous colony.
However, Joséphine’s posthumously published memoir suggests that Bonaparte disregarded his wife’s most prescient counsel. Joséphine wrote that she urged her husband not to send an expedition to Saint-Domingue, prophesying this as a “fatal move” that “would forever take this beautiful colony away from France.” She advised Bonaparte, alternatively, to “keep Toussaint Louverture there. That is the man required to govern the Blacks.”
She subsequently asked him, “What complaints could you have against this leader of the Blacks? He has always maintained correspondence with you; he has done even more, he has given you, in some sense, his children for hostages.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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