Conquering Europe, fumbling emotions.
NAPOLEON (2023) is Ridley Scott at his most chaotic, cheeky, and contradictory — a film that refuses to canonize its subject and instead paints Napoleon Bonaparte as equal parts military genius, political opportunist, awkward lover, and petty gremlin with a big hat. Rather than a traditional cradle-to-grave epic, Scott gives us an irreverent historical collage: moments of brilliance, blunders, passion, and insecurity stitched together at cannon-blast speed.
Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is a deliberate act of demythologizing. He doesn’t play the emperor as a titan of destiny; he plays him as a man constantly overcompensating for the distance between his ambition and his emotional skill set. Phoenix leans into the absurdity — the social awkwardness, the anxious pride, the way Napoleon tries to dominate the world even as he can barely dominate a dinner conversation. His performance is funny, uncomfortable, and unsettlingly human. This Napoleon is not the legend. He’s the man history tried to hide behind the legend.
Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine is the film’s gravitational center — sardonic, sensual, emotionally mercurial, and always one step ahead of her husband’s emotional cluelessness. Kirby plays her with a stillness that terrifies Napoleon more than any battlefield. Their relationship becomes the film’s real war: a push-and-pull of desire, power, and desperation. Napoleon can conquer Europe, but he cannot conquer Joséphine. And Scott frames that irony with wicked humor.
Visually, Scott delivers some of the most staggering battle sequences of his career. The Siege of Toulon is a brutal thesis statement; Austerlitz is icy poetry, a massacre staged like a painting come to life; Waterloo is chaos sculpted into cinema. Scott understands spectacle, but he also refuses to romanticize it. The battles are gorgeous because violence has always been dressed up as beauty. They are also horrifying because history has always been written on bodies.
Yet what makes NAPOLEON fascinating — and divisive — is its refusal to behave like a historical epic. Scott glides over years and events with irreverent momentum, choosing personality over textbook accuracy. He treats Napoleon not as a figure to admire or condemn, but as a man whose mythology outgrew him. The film isn’t neutral; it’s mischievous, bordering on satirical. It asks: what happens when we stop worshipping the “great men” of history and start watching them as they really were — brilliant, insecure, ridiculous, cruel, lonely, astonishing?
The tone is closer to Barry Lyndon than Braveheart — a blend of cynicism, tragedy, and deadpan humor. Scott is uninterested in moralizing. He’d rather let the audience sit in the tension between Napoleon’s tactical genius and his emotional incompetence, between the grandeur of empire and the absurdity of ego.
By the time NAPOLEON reaches St. Helena, the film’s refrain is clear: even the most powerful men die small deaths, remembered not for who they truly were, but for the legends built around them. Scott dismantles the myth to show the insecurities underneath — and in doing so, he delivers one of his strangest, boldest, and most invigorating late-career films.
History may hate it. Historians may riot.
But cinema is better for directors who swing hard, even when they miss a few dates on the timeline.
