YMMV / Napoleon (2023)

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Napoleon and Joséphine's wedding scene mentions a wrong birth date for Napoleon. That's not a research error, but a faithful recreation of the actual scene (both falsified their birth dates to reduce their age gap).
  • A couple of scenes have a black man (played by Abubakar Salim) among Napoleon's officers. The character isn't an example of Black Vikings but a real person; General Thomas Alexandre Dumas Davy de La Pailleterie (1762-1806) is a multiracial Frenchman (born in French Carribbean colonies from a white master and a black slave mother, and went Nom de Mom for much of his life) with a rather prestigious military career (and the first person of color to reach such high ranks in France). He's also the father of famous writer Alexandre Dumas.
• Americans Hate Tingle: The movie got very mixed-to-negative reviews in France, mainly due to some very distracting historical inaccuracies, how Napoleon is portrayed, and Ridley Scott's own very cavalier attitude towards the historian profession. While Napoleon is still a controversial figure in France, people who were keenly aware of his life and history find that the movie doesn't portray his life in a nuanced manner. His legal reforms (which still have a visible legacy today, such as the French Civil Code, a cornerstone in French law) being completely left out and the lack of (or even lack of name-dropping of) his most famous Imperial era officers (Murat, Davout, Ney, etc) are also sore points.
• Anvilicious: The Napoleonic Wars caused hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, something Ridley Scott heavily reminds the viewer of with the (incorrect) number of deaths of each battle being indicated before they begin as well as the (also incorrect) final card before the end credits.
• Awesome Music:
  • The quasi-mystical "Austerlitz Kyrie" for Napoleon's victory at the eponymous battle. The vocal part sounds close to traditional polyphonic choirs of Napoleon's birth island, Corsica.
  • The haunting "Russia" (most of it is actually recycled from the composer's own work on 2016's War and Peace), an ominous piece with choirs that underlines throughout that the country is one of the most inhospitable and gigantic there is to invade, especially in winter, with a spine-chilling crescendo at the battle of the Moskowa (Borodino) that ends with a glorious chanting.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Napoleon taking the cannonball out of his dead horse's guts after the siege of Toulon.
  • Apparently, Napoleon really, really likes mummies... And firing at the pyramids before a battle.
• Franchise Original Sin: Ridley Scott's previous forays into epic historical film, Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven were, if anything, even more inaccurate than Napoleon has been widely criticised as being. Notably, all three have dedicated pages for their sheer numbers of historical inaccuracies. However, those two were covering relatively obscure periods of and events in history, greatly helping to popularise and bring attention to relatively undernoted figures and acting as significantly more well-researched works than many previous epic movies. Napoleon, on the other hand, covers an extremely well-known figure, in an era when historical knowledge is far more widespread, discovering inaccuracies far easier, and fictional accuracy far more highly prized than it was in the 2000s. The result? A much more contentious film than its precedessors.
• Fetish Retardant: The various sex scenes in the film were criticised for being awkward and cringe-worthy, even more so than House of Gucci, which got the same criticisms for it’s sex scenes. According to Ridley, they were improvised as he finds sex scenes boring and decided to make them amusing and funny as to add sensuality to them, but many noted that it didn’t work and just made it even more cringy and uncomfortable.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Napoleon Bonaparte was a TERRIBLE PERSON^ExplanationA rant from a historian in response to the trailer for seemingly portraying Napoleon as a good person became a popular copypasta, appending the phrase to other historical figures like Genghis Khan or fictional villains like Sephiroth. As of the release of the movie, this is actually Hilarious in Hindsight: the film does not shy away from portraying Napoleon as a massively egotistical, even cruel individual.
  • Comparisons between this and another emperor Joaquin Phoenix played in a Ridley Scott film (Commodus).
  • "Starting a fight with like seven groups of people at once is actually the perfect way to market a Napoleon movie"^ExplanationAs elaborated on in the trivia section, Ridley Scott responded to a lot of pre and post-release criticism with incredibly antagonistic language which led to this tweet. Many of the people who noticed this enjoyed how Scott was apparently adopting his subject's personality for the press tour.
  • "You think you're so great because you have BOATS!" is commonly singled out as evidence of the film's narmy and reductive dialogue, characterization, and portrayal of complex geopolitics all in one.
• Narm:
  • Robespierre’s arrest is downright nuts, with people getting knocked over and tackled as if they were in a wrestling match, all in an effort to arrest just one man. And then there’s the awkward pause after he shoots himself in the jaw that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia if one were to add the music and title cards from that series.
  • The aforementioned line "You think you're so great because you have BOATS!".
  • The Egypt campaign is chock full of these, with Napoleon firing cannons at the pyramids before a battle (which didn’t even happen in real life), having a particular interest in a mummy and even affectionally touching it’s face (we even get a musical buildup to it), saying “No dessert. You may leave.” to Junot (akin to a parent disciplining his child) after he tells Napoleon of Josephine cheating on him, and then him abandoning his entire campaign just to go back to France and confront her, despite his men warning that it’ll be seen as desertion.
  • Speaking of Josephine’s affair, the scene where she returns home and finds her belongings on the lawn wouldn’t be out of place in a soap opera.
  • Napoleon’s death, where we get a still shot of him staring out at the sea……..and then he slowly keels over out of frame as if he had passed out drunk in a way that wouldn’t be out of place in a comedy skit. Even worse is that it’s the final shot of the movie before it cuts to the credits.
• Nightmare Fuel: Napoleon's Russian campaign feels like a nightmare, from start to finish, including the ominous soundtrack. While he's invading, groups of Cossacks harass his armies, nailing dead French soldiers on trees for intimidation. Once he's in Moscow, the city is eerily empty, and soon gets ravaged by an apocalyptic fire. Once he's forced to retreat, the ruthless Russian winter, hunger and diseases decimate his armies.
• Padding:
  • A few scenes with Napoleon and Joséphine involve them just sitting by the table for a minute or so and staring either at each other or in the distance, with no words being spoken. It really doesn't add much neither to the development of their relationship, nor to the plot overall. What makes it jarring is that at the same time, many historical facts from Napoleon's life were omitted in this movie (see Artistic License – History for more details) — undoubtedly, in order to not drag out the screentime too much — in favor of scenes like this.
  • There's this weird, out-of-nowhere scene with Napoleon opening the sarcophagus in Egypt and acting... affectionate towards the mummy inside it. This drags on for a few minutes, adds absolutely nothing to the plot and is downright cringeworthy. You've got to wonder what was coming through the director's head when he decided to put such scene in the movie in the first place. The screentime could've been used to at least showcase the fact that Napoleon brought scientist to study Ancient Egypt in his expeditionary force, which is what the quick mummy vignette in the Kubrick script did.
• Questionable Casting: Joaquin Phoenix got a lot of this, especially from people who are into Napoleonic history and don't find him as energetic as Napoleon was, with many likening his take on the role to Arthur Fleck. Some also question the decision to have him play Napoleon in his younger years. Phoenix himself apparently shared this sentiment, complaining to Scott before principal photography that he had no idea how to portray the character.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: To an extent. While the relationship between with Joséphine was very important in Napoleon's life, it gets main focus in the movie (and, to make things worse, many scenes involving them add little to the plot) to the point of leaving out many, many other interesting historical figures that really deserved to be portrayed (we don't even learn the names of many of them until the credits), not to mention many events of crucial importance from the Napoleonic era — like the Spanish campaign or everything that happened between Bonaparte's retreat from Russia and his first abdication.
• Spiritual Successor: In France, another biopic about a charismatic French military leader that came to prominence during The French Revolution, Vaincre ou Mourir (about the Wars in Vendée during the Revolution), was released in early 2023. Although the intents of Ridley Scott and those of the creators of Vaincre ou Mourir are quite different (and likely more politically motivated in the latter case), both view the Revolution and the Reign of Terror in quite a similar way, and they have similarly gloomy (if much higher budgeted for Napoleon) depictions of war and color palettes. Also works as a Spiritual Antithesis, since Charette (Vaincre ou Mourir) was royalist and only left a mark in history for modern royalists and sympathizers of them, while Napoleon served the Republic, didn't seek to reestablish the old monarchy (preferring to set up his own) and ended up one of the most enduringly famous figures in world history.
• Tainted by the Preview: Suffice to say, Ridley Scott's vitriolic remarks towards historians who criticized historical inaccuracies in the film did not endear many people do it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Has this in spades, with many of the most interesting military leaders involved in the Napoleonic Wars being relegated to small roles or being eliminated from the film altogether in order to prioritize Napoleon and Josephine's love story.
  • The most glaring example might be General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (portrayed by Abubakar Salim), whose inclusion on the surface would be a net positive for the film, but who has very limited screen-time and doesn't even get a proper introduction subtitle (afforded to other major figures in Napoleon's life and career). And, when he does get to participate in the events in the film, it is usually anachronistic. For instance, Dumas would not have been present for the November 1799 coup d'etat — because he was being held prisoner in the Kingdom of Naples at the time, having been jailed in Italy on route back to France following the campaign in Egypt, and he would remain there until 1801. The film's overall neglect of General Dumas is what led some to mistakenly conclude this to be a Black Vikings example, and it is hard to overstate the storytelling possibilities that a conflict between Napoleon and Dumas, culminating with his being imprisoned wrongfully and forsaken by Bonaparte, could have generated.

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