What’s worse is that as far as I remember the 1970s rod stieger napoleon movie does more with less words. “Soldiers, do you recognize me? If you want to kill your emperor here I am.” It’s all about delivery.

@@menschman1464 That scene was so epic, like holy shit.

He was an incel in his youth, he wrote papers on how immoral prostitutes were, then lost his virginity to a prostitute.

Truly one of the movies ever made

The word "several" doing alot of work

It's a film alright. It's definitely a film.

​@@MrJethrohanot doing enough work

100% agree. Ridley Scott constantly does this in his movies and it pisses me off because of how ugly it looks. His film All The Money in the World was also desaturated to shit and it ruined the entire visual palette completely. I think he's trying to make it look even more "cinematic" but it just ends up looking like a bandaid for feeling cinematic instead of actually being that way with the cinematography itself.

@@rohanbeer1654 what bums me out is look at the color in the duelists, in blade runner legend and alien, they’re beautiful visually

​@@menschman1464all of Ridley's boring looking movies of the last 10 years plus have been director of photography by Dariusz Wolski. Though no means bad he makes things dull in my opinion. The movies you liked are all different DP's. Basically you want him to use a different DP which I would agree with.

I didn’t think about that until now

The account pfp holds the answer to your question my friend

Totally.

As someone who can read french. I recommend doing a Google translate of the french reviews. Highly entertaining.

It's like they took his awkward angry young man writing and used that as a basis for the adult character. There is a story about how someone found a rejected essay he wrote in his youth and he tore it it into bits and said something like "I would whip the fool who wrote this if I met him in the street". Maybe the 4-hour cut has 2 hours of him obsessively writing propaganda for the state-owned press in order to control the narrative and another hour of him designing uniforms.

That's a pretty bad summary for a historian. (Not nearly as bad as the movie of course!) Napoleon might have been a nobleman this did not really amount to much. He was well known to be without manners, smelly and unkempt as a young man. Also did you just forget Joseph?

@@gubruikertje Not the OP but I have studied Napoleon's youth and he was basically a middle class emo kid from 2002. It's actually quite creepy how similar he was to them. The movie is dire.

@@gubruikertje Yes, I did forget Joseph, although despite his status as the eldest, Joseph was always a relatively low key person, smart but not bright, vain but not proud. As for "Napoleon being a noble did not amount to much", it amounted to a good education, basic manners, etiquette and the Classics, which he quoted often. His notes on Machiavelli's The Prince are full of his middling erudition. Which the movie ignores. As for his manners, yes, he came off as a brash and unpolished person, but one has to wonder where are we getting these accounts from, and why? Many of the texts mentioning Napoleon as a dirty, bad-mannered man come from people who already held prejudices against him for the simple fact that he came from the provinces and probably had what Paris would have considered "rough manners", just like they described the American ambassadors often. It's not true, at least not at the level the movie shows us. Again, Rémusat's memoirs are one of the best ways for us to know NOT the way Napoleon and his brothers acted (Rémusat wrote with the explicit intent to show the dirt under the ermine, a testimony we have to analise carefully) but the way the Parisian elite, not even the high nobility, saw the Bonapartes: as a brash and poor clan of tightly knit petty individuals. If there's any book that could have been a source for the movie, it's this one (but I doubt Scarpa read anything past Napoleon's English wiki page).

​@@Ennio444 You contradict yourself,in some ways.First you write that Rémusats memoirs show Napoleon the man very well,then you write the contrary ( further down ). As a matter of fact,Rémusat wrote negatively about him with a purpose.And that purpose was not honest. Interestingly enough,her son wrote ( in HIS memoirs) that,when the news of Napoleons death reached Paris in 1821, Mme Rémusat spent the whole day crying about it....! Strange contrast .

He reintroduced slavery after the revolution freed all the French slaves and made them citizens.

@@SewingandCaring Indeed. He was also deeply flawed. The atrocities in Spain, stupidly putting his very disliked brother on the Spanish throne, invading Russia - what the hell was he thinking? And at the same time, he swept away the last remnants of feudalism wherever his armies marched, emancipated the Jews, set up Poland as an autonomous state in his empire and established the Napoleonic Code, among many other things. That's all part of why he continues to fascinate - he was very complex and contradictory. Who was this guy?

@@squamish4244 He was all about looking after his own family; this is a man who basically called in sick to the Army, twice, so he could go back to Corsica and argue about his family's right to some trees. Edit: I just remembered that the reason the French navy had so many issues is because they had to use young wood after the US refused to help them and export what they needed. lol.

@@SewingandCaring The USA didn't want to anger Britain. With good cause - the War of 1812 happened during the Napoleonic Wars, and Britain blockaded the entire American coast. I'm sure you're well-informed about Napoleon, but - so am I, as you clearly know by now. Here's the thing. The very fact that we disagree proves my point. One of the reasons we're still talking about Napoleo is because of all these different sides to him. Some of us will view him in a more positive light than others, and nobody is going to win this debate. One book simply stated that there can be no final judgement of Napoleon. It's up to you. The last line quotes Aristotle: He was "either a beast or a god". In 200 years, and after more books written about him than anyone else, historians have never reached a consensus on Napoleon, At this point, they are unlikely ever to.

​@@SewingandCaringSlavery was reintroduced for economic reasons.And the slaves that had been freed beforehand went around committing atrocities against their former French masters,creating turmoil and civil strife. They were not mature enough to live in freedom. Obviously.

Hello fellow historian, this movie shows Napolien blowing up the pyramids and all of the facings falling off. I think this tells us all we need to know about this movie.

now watching the video, I agree so much with Jake on the combined feeling of loving and hating it lol I'd rate it a 6. i said 6.5 right out of the theater, but the more I have distance from the amazing visual experience (and Joaquin), it's a 6.

The fuck

is that the japanese one?

@@obscure.reference yeah

“society,” - Joaquin Phoenix

Good suggestion

The ways it's pro British is how it rewrites history. Lots of these characters never met in history and also bad things Napoleon did are made up entirely. French generally treated prisoners well for the time period. Then enemy fell into frozen lake the french helped them out of it gave them blankets. For an example.

I don't think the problem was showing him as a monster, but if you are doing a deep dive into the life of the monster, you kinda have to show why people where so willing to follow him. France just decapitated their kings and queens, only to get an emperor is return, why did they do that? Making him weird, uncharismatic and leaving out his actual way of ruling just feels unbelievable.

@@TheJanpietjoris The problem is that they based this portrayal off of his teenage angst phase not how he was as an adult. One of the interesting quirks of history is Napoleon the Thirds friendship with Queen Victoria. He had his uncle's charisma (but not any brains at all), and if you read the way the British wrote about number three then you are likely very close to seeing and understanding how Bonaparte's personality really was. It was also this last Napoleon's force of personality which started to romanticise his Uncle amongst the french. This isn't even obscure history, this is 'talk to one history professor just once' level of research.

@@SewingandCaring oh that is interesting! He did come across quite teenager-like in the movie. Whenever he communicated with Josephine, I'd swore he' d never spoken to a woman before.

@@TheJanpietjoris What sums up teenage Napoleon the most is that he wrote long sanctimonious letters and essays on how prostitutes, and men who used them, were scum. Then he writes an essay talking about how he lost his virginity to a prostitute and suddenly they are good actually.