Writing for Slate, Dana Stevens reviews Apple Original Films’ “Napoleon” from Ridley Scott, saying it “feels rushed” and suggesting that interested viewers wait to watch the four-hour director’s cut when it arrives on Apple TV+.
It sounds strange to say that a 2-hour-and-38-minute-long epic like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels rushed, but even a runtime that capacious proves too short for this ambitious but muddled film to cover almost three decades of its subject’s absurdly eventful life.
The most engaging conflict arises not from the extravagantly orchestrated clashes between armies but from the relationship between Napoleon and Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), an aristocratic widow who becomes his first wife and the lifelong object of his passion, jealousy, and love, even after he divorces her for failing to bear him a son and heir… Kirby is a fiercely committed actor with a naturally commanding presence; though she gets far less screen time than Phoenix, her portrait of the power-hungry, pleasure-seeking empress is vivid enough that the movie might easily be titled Napoleon and Joséphine.
Joaquin Phoenix is incapable of giving a dull performance, and his Napoleon is a fascinating tangle of contradictory drives: As petulant, selfish, and impulsive as he often shows himself to be, he is also capable of motivating hordes of people (his soldiers, his fellow politicians, the whole French populace) to believe in his self-mythologizing propaganda, sometimes to the point of sacrificing their own lives…
Maybe the four-hour-long director’s cut, which is scheduled to be released on Apple TV+ after the film’s theatrical run, will expand on some of these truncated story arcs and underdeveloped characters. As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.
MacDailyNews Take: Ridley Scott has promised that Apple TV+ will stream Ridley Scott’s epic 4-hour director’s cut of Napoleon.
We’re waiting patiently for the director’s cut on Apple TV+! – MacDailyNews, November 15, 2023
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
I assume there are some BIPOC LGBTQIA2++ characters to appeal to a wider audience
I suppose Apple will be happy if the box office take is higher than what they got for “Killers of the Flower Moon”.
Any body other than Walk-Corpse Phoenix would have been a better lead. He’s 20 years too old for this role and a morbid actor.
The Joker does Mass murder…
Not many films I watch the first 30 mins of, but ‘The Joker’ was one of them.