This not so much a real review; more a superficial and admittedly simplistic personal reaction. A bit of a chat.

A couple of days ago, I saw Ridley Scott’s new movie Napoleon with a friend.

She hated it from start to finish.

I thought it was very well directed but I was totally emotionally uninvolved all the way through.

Joaquin Phoenix (Napoleon) got lots of lines; Vanessa Kirby (Josephine) did all the acting without having too much to say. He was passable but faintly uninteresting. I thought she was good – she’s been good in the last two Mission Impossible films and she apparently played the difficult part of Princess Margaret in TV’s The Crown and succeeded rather well.

My friend thought Joaquin Phoenix was just playing the Joker in a different costume. I don’t agree though (as she did) I liked him very much in Joker. My friend didn’t like Vanessa Kirby as Josephine at all; I disagree.

She thought the battle scenes were badly done; I disagree, but I remained emotionally uninvolved in them. 

I was perfectly happy watching the direction and the visual set-ups and lighting. Young Ridley was quite big on candles in this one! The storyline was OK but I wasn’t emotionally involved in the character of Napoleon at all; I did wonder if a lot of what he said was taken straight from his letters and his speeches as there was a bit of starchiness and ‘not-quite right’ in the sentences.

I thought it was a good IDEA to alternate big epic action scenes with the Napoleon/Josephine relationship; but it didn’t work.

The last film I saw with my friend was Oppenheimer which she liked and I disliked. I wrote another non-review blog about it. Again, with Oppenheimer, I felt uninvolved throughout.

Two good directors not quite being as good as they can be.

Both films were too long – Oppenheimer is one minute over 3 hours and Napoleon is two hours 37 – it feels longer  – and I think the problem in both cases was they told (sort of) the whole story from beginning to end and it would have been better to have zeroed-in on a part of the story.

With Napoleon, it goes from him being a nonentity during the French Revolution… to his end in St Helena.

There were some strangely graphic sex scenes (though I think Vanessa Kirby must have wisely had a no-nudity clause in her contract). I guess they were necessary but they jarred a bit… though not as badly as the appallingly unnecessary sex scene in Oppenheimer. (Note to director Christopher Nolan: You can’t do sex scenes.)

I would sit through Napoleon again, but then I would sit through most movies again except Visconti’s The Damned (Götterdämmerung indeed) and an awful German documentary about George Best called Football as Never Before.

The utter tedium of The Damned (1969) still haunts me in a bad way.

Napoleon won’t haunt me; it is a perfectly OK way to spend 157 minutes in the company of well-composed and photographed images. 

But I don’t think that was the sum total of what anyone intended for $200 million. 

Yes, yes, I know… Criticism is easy; creating art is not.

And, yes, the difference between me and Ridley Scott is that, if you gave me $200 million to make a movie, it would be an absolute financial and artistic catastrophe. 

With Ridley Scott, you are guaranteed a watchable film and probably a very tidy profit for Apple, who financed it. 

But, then, as someone wisely said, Apple doesn’t necessarily care about any financial profit on Napoleon. For them, it is more about PR and image… $200 million is an almost throwaway sum for them – Put it down as a bit of advertising cost to generate and solidify good PR and continued image-building for Apple TV+

Me? I have to stop writing now and go out to buy some food from Poundland, the cheap supermarket.