After all the commotion I heard about Ridley Scott’s new film about the French leader Napoleon, I was extremely excited to view it in theaters. I’ve had a thing for historical documentaries ever since I first started viewing them in history class. This being said, the ones in history class aren’t Oscar-winning films, so I was extremely excited to see how Napoleon would top them. Right off the bat, I felt hopeful “Napoleon,” would live up to the hype because Scott also directed the movie “Gladiator,” which was a great movie, so my expectations were pretty high.
The way the movie started off was very interesting. It was fascinating to see how Napoleon became the leader of France after they killed the queen. It was also interesting to see how the country’s most fearless leader actually felt a wave of nervousness leading France into their first battle. However, he didn’t allow his fear to affect him because he was able to make a game plan and attack his enemies in the least expected way.
In his first battle, The Seige of Toulon, he attacked the Hazburg forces when they were sleeping and singing, marking a victory for the French. This battle changed Napoleon’s title of First Consul Of France and started Napoleon’s reign and dominance of Europe. It was really interesting to see how easily Napoleon was able to take over Europe that quickly with no real fight as well.
Some of the things that I didn’t like about the movie is how the movie didn’t go into great detail about Napoleon’s strategy of fighting. They didn’t mention his way of coming up with strategies and how they were so effective; instead, the movie was just him leading attacks in different ways. For example, in the last battle scene, it was just him leading his army into a fight, where he lost to Prussia, Austria, Sweden and Russia. This showed them approaching a new fighting style without going into detail about how they did it. Overall, I believe this movie is good, but not the greatest. It’s definitely a very entertaining movie to watch and extremely action-packed, but I just felt as a lot of key details were missing. I would’ve been more involved if they showed Napoloen’s thoughts and the reasoning behind many of his actions. However, if you have any sort of interest in historical warfare, I would suggest watching this movie. I would give it a 7.5/10.
