Ridley Scott’s new movie Napoleon is about the life and times of the iconic French Emperor. Joaquin Phoenix looks great in the titular role. It looks like it’s going to span at least from the French Revolution to Waterloo. Which leads me to ask: How long is this movie going to be?
Neat trailer, but Ridley Scott has to be one of the best examples of a director who makes amazing movies and terrible movies with no real way to determine quality before the movie is released.
Seriously, his filmography is a mix of amazing movies like Alien, Blade Runner, and The Martian and atrocious movies like…well, you can look at his filmography and pick. He actually has a ton of bad movies.
I hope this one is successful. I know Stanley Kubrick was working on a Napoleon movie for a long time and at one point, I thought Stephen Spielberg was going to make Kubrick’s Napoleon movie, but I haven’t heard of any progress on that in a long time. I assume this is not Kubrick’s unmade movie being made.
It’s not the Kubrick project. It’s a new script.
The man likes to work. He’s made basically a movie a year for the last 20 years. He knows the industry is screwy, so he keeps many irons in the fire, and when one gets a green light he goes for it, whether or not the script is fully baked. Sometimes the material is ready, and he makes a classic. Sometimes it’s not, and he makes an Exodus or a Robin Hood. Either way, he doesn’t sweat it, he just finishes and moves on to the next one.
Compare someone like Guillermo del Toro, who makes fewer movies because he’s attached to fewer projects and he has a reduced backup list when he can’t get a pet project approved.
According to the film’s Wikipedia page, 2 hours and 38 minutes.
My guess is that a lot of those battle scenes are just bits of some very expensive montages.
Good for him! Let your mistakes recede in the rear view mirror. “What’s behind me is not important!”
The rest of us have to suffer through 2 hours 38 minutes to find out a movie was one of the sucky ones. As for me, I’m getting too old for that shit.
Maybe just wait for the reviews to roll in. If the critics love it, it will be mentioned for Oscars. If they hate it, it will be blown apart.
.
mmm
Hey, if I want to watch a fruitless land war involving Russia, I’ll just turn on the news.
Seriously though, what I’m getting from that trailer is 1) Joaquin Phoenix is mumbling in every single scene; 2) expect heavy blue and orange filters throughout, a la Blade Runner 1 & 2; and 3) oh look - it’s the Painted Hall in Greenwich again.
I’m not optimistic.
The 1970 film Waterloo, which dealt with just that one battle, clocked in at a tad over two hours. It included actual cavalry charging actual infantry squares. I am beginning to think we saw all the best parts in the trailer.
Joaquin Phoenix is a very odd choice to play Napoleon Bonaparte, and certainly the trailer just enhances that impression; he’s mumbly and stiff and seems awkward, like, well, a Joaquin Phoenix character. That’s… um… NOT AT ALL like Napoleon Bonaparte. (He does physically work though; Napoleon was noted for most of his life for being thin and gaunt and always looking a bit sickly. He started gaining weight only later on.) Napoleon was charismatic, funny, confident, a ladies’ man. He impressed people with his energy. He was very, very intelligent and people who met him thought he was exceptionally sharp. He was a naturally inspiring leader.
Funny thing is, this looks like the big Oscar movie and Phoenix already gave an Oscar level performance this year in Beau is Afraid.
I doubt Beau is Afraid will get any recognition, but his performance in it was incredible.
I saw what you did there.
And I think I saw what the title of Napoleon Dynamite did there.
nm, off topic
[Emphasis mine]
I’m not sure about that. I checked the cast listing, and while Tsar Alexander is there, nobody seems to be playing Wellington - which to me implies that, if the movie does indeed end with a battle, it’ll be Leipzig, which (with all due respect to the British) is where Napoleon was actually defeated.
Maybe Ridley Scott is saving the Hundred Days for the sequel.
Not surprising. Wellington never met Napoleon personally. The Tsar did.
The guy at 1:41 looks like Wellington. A few seconds before, there’s French cavalry charging at British infantry squares, which most famously happened at Waterloo.
I just looked him up on IMDB and he is 85 years old and has two movies in post-production and three movies in pre-production. Apparently he’s going to keep making movies until they drag his corpse off the set.
I mean, it’s not the first time Joaquin Phoenix has played an emperor in a Ridley Scott film.
He’s amazingly efficient and has just gotten more so. Remember when All the Money in the World was a few weeks from release and Kevin Spacey was outed as a slimeball so Scott chopped him out and reshoot all his scenes with Christopher Plummer and had the movie recut and ready to go on schedule? I can’t think of another filmmaker who could have achieved that.