Dismal Napoleon movie fails on an epic scale

I went to see the new film about Napoleon. And just like that great General’s invasion of Russia in 1812, that was my big mistake. Had I not been there with a friend, I would have retreated myself about half way through. While waiting for Waterloo to come along to finish the whole dismal business off, I heard the words of ABBA reminding me that I couldn’t escape if I wanted to.

Where do you start with it?

Before going to see it, I heard a lot of historians were complaining about the film’s historical inaccuracies. One member of that profession after another lined up to have a pop – and get an appearance fee – for dissing the factual basis of much of what is shown on screen. That gave me a bad steer for, mes amis, whether this film is accurate or not is the least of its problems.

For starters, there are things you expect to be good in a Ridley Scott film no matter what – but not this time.

You go thinking of that extraordinary opening to Gladiator, one of the best of his many great movies. The building of tension, the excitement, the rush, the music, the arresting image – of the flaming arrow across the sky – as the General gives the order to "unleash hell". Now that is an opening, but there was nothing like it on show here. You expect the action to be edge of your seat, thrilling stuff, but the battle scenes just weren’t very good: I’ve read a fair amount of military history over the years and I hadn’t a clue what was happening in those sequences. Napoleon was the greatest military genius of modern times – about this there is no serious debate – but there is very little evidence of that here.

There was also a lot of focus on Napoleon and Joséphine’s relationship, so much so that many say it should have been called ‘Napoleon and Joséphine’, which would have given a fairer sense of it, I think. And it could have built from strength there as the performance of Joséphine by Vanessa Kirby was the unquestionable highlight of the film: she is very good. But, and maybe I missed it, watching the movie, I hadn’t the first idea why Napoleon and Joséphine came together. There was no chemistry that was apparent to me. I find it hard to imagine that anyone watching it found any of their relationship exciting (certainly not), poignant, or frankly cared less about its demise.

For good and all as the performance of Joséphine was, that lack of chemistry pointed to the fundamental reason the film couldn’t be a success: it was because Napoleon was depicted as so incredibly boring. Boring, boring, boring – a tricolore of boring. And it really is quite something to make a film about the personality and life of Napoleon Bonaparte boring. To depict him as such and to accomplish it so comprehensively requires an audacious strategy of the calibre that only the great General himself could have pulled off.

Once they had established the main character as tedious, the span of the film was nobody’s friend. We meet Napoleon at the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793 and it brings us all the way to his death on St Helena in 1821. Some said that one actor couldn’t carry this off as the age range was too wide but this wasn’t the issue: in movies you have to sometimes suspend your analysis of these things and covering the full span of an adult’s life sure wasn’t a problem in Citizen Kane. No, the issue here was that there wasn’t a strong enough personality to carry the breadth of the story.

The film portrayed him as either giving out or being generally disagreeable, or indecisive or idiotic or useless. He mooched about the screen annoying both characters and viewers, this moaning fella who just seemed to want to be in charge of stuff, with a load of other people seemingly prepared to let him – for reasons entirely unclear based on what unfolded on screen. How anyone followed this lad anywhere was the one great mystery the movie managed to sustain.

The magic sauce that was missing was the greatness of the man. This is why he was loved, by Joséphine, by so many of the French, by people all over Europe, and many in Ireland. He was a hope for a new world, one where superstition and feudalism and arbitrary law was thrown on the fire. Combine that with his sheer brilliance and audacity, and you have some sense of why so many people followed him – even after crushing defeat. It is true that he displayed elements of the tyrant and that he got many things wrong, and it is certainly the case that his personality wasn’t always glowing. Beethoven (no mean judge of humanity) was a big fan who turned against him for those tyrannical tendencies.

But you cannot talk with any impact about his inadequacies or his errors or his self-regarding unless you set out his genius. It is the contrast between those things which makes the life of Napoleon Bonaparte so fascinating. But in the movie the absence of a compelling, charismatic protagonist meant there was not a strong enough thread to connect all the famous scenes together in some sort of coherent way. Where that might have been done by focusing on the greatness of his personality – while at the same time highlighting his failures, inadequacies, and occasional poor judgements – instead it was just a series of events, shunting us towards the inevitable defeat that we all knew was coming.

There is a long-running historical debate in which Napoleon is a central character. Do such people shape history, or does history shape how these people emerge? So, without the Great Depression and the Treaty of Versailles, would Adolf Hitler have become the dictator and monster he did? And if Hitler had never been born, would someone just like him have emerged because of the Great Depression and the Treaty of Versailles?

It is the same type of question with Napoleon. Without the French Revolution, would Napoleon have just been a capable artillery officer in the French Army rather than an Emperor? But if he had not existed, or died of some random disease at 18, would someone like him still have emerged to shake the foundations of Europe? If you think that events are less shaped by individual people and more by the forces in society, Napoleon’s personality is rather less important.

But every serious thinker for 200 years who has examined this question finds it hard to sustain that position because of the actual personality and life of Napoleon. That ongoing debate is an interesting one because it explores how much of anyone’s life is shaped by the times and circumstances they are in and how much they shape it themselves by their own personality and will. This film, by portraying one of the greatest figures in history as a bore, did nothing to contribute to that important debate. That was a bigger problem than whether the history was all factually accurate or not.