Napoleon - Apple TV+ - Ridley Scott & Joaquin Phoenix

thinkabouit

5/10 from me, was a steaming pile of crap!

Maybe the longer version might be better, similar to Zac Snyders Justice League

Iguarantee

I loved it.

I think you’d need three movies to do the historical character true justice and I think you could make the movies five different ways and still miss something or compromise on something that would have people discontent (not to say they wouldn’t be justified in feeling so).

For a single movie, encompassing the life of one of histories greatest characters, I really enjoyed it, because 3 hours isn’t enough and it was still entertaining to the last.

I’m looking forward to the directors cut from the true king of directors cuts.

dr.kenneth noisewater

Any word on when its coming to Apple TV+?

pixelburp

Finally arriving on March 1st on Apple TV+

Apparently it'll only be the theatrical version and not the rumoured 4+ hour version supposedly still coming at some stage.

https://deadline.com/2024/02/napoleon-streaming-date-apple-tv-1235826716/

swiwi_

Terrible film. Tediously boring. Only watched it bc I have Apple TV.

pixelburp

Finally got to see this via Apple TV and if the rumours of a 4 hour version are true, then this is the version they should have gone with; cos as it stands?

This was an utterly disjointed sequence of admittedly handsome vignettes, all shot with reflexive aplomb and convincing FX work that only an octogenarian master of the lens can bring - but that was about it. The structure was slapdash and incoherent to a point it sometimes devolved into an unwatchable state. Napoleon's life was storied and contained innumerable twists and turns within a period that was itself fascinating; yet reducing it to a dissonant collection of random events often barely connected together (the cut to Egypt a particularly singular jarring moment) made the experience bordering on disorienting and at times gruelling. This was a good example where things "just happened", characters walked in and out of the movie without purpose. There's much to admire with Scott's velocity even at this advanced age, putting us all to shame, but this felt positively rushed and more than a little sloppy; if we lost House of Gucci for better editing here? Even for someone like myself with a passing knowledge of the emperor's life, the experience became bewildering as we bounced around the late 18th, early 19th centuries like a pinball - lord knows what someone coming utterly fresh to this iconic man would think.

Well. To that end, what they might think was that Napoleon was a pitifully whiny man-child who wallowed in a near permanent state of arrested development. As said this was a complex man whose achievements had to be taken against what was a fluctuating time of post revolution France amid scheming European monarchical powers; yet Ridley Scott chose to render him as what amounted to a toddler.

The most charitable read I could take, and it born by a statistic in the final shot of the the deaths Napoleon caused, would be it was some flex towards a deconstruction of the tedious Great Man approach to history; the tendency for our histories to be dominated by kings and psychopaths vaunted as worth celebrating, but this film stripped Napoleon down into something resembling a cartoon rather than an untangling of a mythic figure.

pauly58

It just didn't do it for me, as an earlier poster said, Armand Assante in the 80's mini series was more believable. The battle scenes were impressive & Vanessa Kirby was good as Josephine but I can't say the film was a classic.