My experience of this film, which I just went to see, perfectly mirror’s my experience with Oppenheimer: with the earlier film, I was bored with the idea and impressed with the result. For Napoleon, I was excited that it was made, and just spend two and half hours sitting through it, wishing I had done something else.

Napoleon Bonaparte is an everlasting refutation to anyone who denies that Great Men exist. He is someone who defined an entire epoch of history, and who did so by the skillful exploitation of a significant set of talents and virtues. He was both erudite and energetic, decisive and charismatic. Since the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, Europe has gone through periodic attempts to unify the continent and its peoples under a single powerful state. None have ever succeeded, but Napoleon came closer than anyone else, and failed largely due to an act of hubris so infamous it has been memed thoroughly and become the subject of concertos. His life was an epic poets wish they could have written.

We get none of that in Ridley Scott’s new film. We get a miserable love affair between two miserable people, occasionally punctuated by cannon fire. For reasons known only to God, the script decides to put Napoleon’s tempestuous relationship with his first wife Josephine in center stage, as if this was what anyone in the paying audience came for. Vast swaths of Napoleon’s actions a general and ruler, his struggles and accomplishments, are ignored in favor of his rather tawdry love life. The film attempts to inflate Josephine into Napoleon’s silent partner, without bothering to show any way in which she did that. Had the film been called Napoleon & Josephine, or even Josephine, and cut out all the battles, it would have been more honest.

On top of this, the film’s scenes are dreary, portentous, lacking energy. Every scene proceeds like a tableau, characters consciously playing roles, as if they know the cameras are there. And they go on interminably, like Ibsen plays. This is even true of the battle scenes: the icy set-piece of Austerlitz, with cannonballs crashing into a frozen river to destroy the Austrian army, oversells its action. The audience is constantly getting the point well before the scene ends.

This is a shame, as some of the casting choices are enjoyable. Not, however, the lead role. Joaquin Phoenix is an actor suited to certain kinds of parts, conveying certain kinds of emotions. Joaquin Phoenix does tortured, he does embittered, he does malevolent and pathetic, he even does comic in certain circumstances. He does not do charismatic heroism. When Talleyrand tells him that the British think of him as a “Corsican thug”, when Josephine tells him he’s a brute, it’s hard to argue with them. We see a few moments of bizarre comical self-restraint peppered with petulant cruelty. There is nothing to admire in this sweaty killer of men, which raises the question of why Scott bothered to make a movie about him.

Finally, the film is dull even to look at. One gets a sense that Scott was trying emulate Stanley Kubrick (who had his own dreams of a Napoleon epic in the 60’s, smothered in the crib by the studio), whose Barry Lyndon used natural light or candlelight to give us the sense of the 18th century. That’s fine for a dense tragicomedy. But even the battles in this movie look like the film stock got left in a swamp. Everything is grey and cold, everything is grimy and joyless. Nothing of what Napoleon fought to establish, nothing of what his enemies fought to preserve, is given a minute’s reflection. A Telenovela could have told this story better.