Napoleon (2023) Review Part 2: A Further Round-Up

Written By Shellie Audsley
Napoleon at an overcast battlefield, holding up a spyglass

Napoleon at an overcast battlefield, holding up a spyglass. Movie still from Apple TV+.

Napoleon (including a 4-hour director’s cut) will be made available for streaming March 1st, and we're still thinking about it at K-SAA. Laura Sadler (Northumbria, 18th-and-19th- century literature) recently shared her thoughts. Following her insightful discussion on the film as a grand war epic and dramatic biopic (which is not without many failings on both counts), we've been reading a host of other reviews, which we thought we'd round up and share as you view the movie and bring this version of the important Romantic-era figure into your own homes.

“Ay, alive and still bold,” muttered Earth,
“Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled,
In terror, and blood, and gold,
A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.
Leave the millions who follow to mould
The metal before it is cold,
And weave into his shame, which like the dead
Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled.“

— Percy Shelley, “Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon“

Napoleon appears throughout Romantic-era literature. Jane Austen’s Persuasion is set in the hundred days of Anglo-French peace between Napoleon’s initial capture and his escape from Elba. Percy Shelley wrote “Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon” when the deposed emperor died in his second exile on Saint Helena. And William Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’ouverture” hails the Haitian Revolutionary leader whom Napoleon tricked, captured, and imprisoned in the French Alps. 

How does Ridley Scott capture the life of this storied figure? In addition to historical inaccuracy, Scott’s Napoleon has been panned for its failure as an epic (Rolling Stone calls it “a difficult-man drama”), its inconsistency and idiosyncracy, its narrative formlessness, and its “lack of engagement with the political meanings”of Napoleon’s achievements and failures. One recurring and important criticism is the film’s neglect of Napoleon’s role as colonizer. The film shows Napoleon’s troops shooting at the Pyramids (which didn’t happen) at the “Battle of the Pyramids” (which didn’t take place at the Pyramids), but doesn’t meaningfully engage with the occupation of Egypt, which Edward Said argues produced a “universe of discourse” that “gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient.” The film’s biggest omission, however, is of Napoleon’s attempted re-enslavement of Haiti: “I am for the whites, because I am white,” the Emperor proclaimed. Given this legacy of violence, what does it mean for Scott’s film to focus on Napoleon’s interiority and romantic life? Is a biopic (even a four-hour director’s cut) an adequate medium for these chapters in history? And if it is not, what and how may the portrayal of his private life add to or complicate his public facade? How would you like to see the Romantic era represented on screen? Let us know in the comments. 

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Shellie Audsley
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