After the near-billion dollar success of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar frontrunner Oppenheimer, Ridley Scott joins the award season race with his own epic-scaled biopic Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the title figure and Vanessa Kirby as Empress Joséphine. But with a streaming-only 4 hours and 10 minute version coming to AppleTV+, this over-edited 2 hours 38 minutes theatrical cut of Napoleon can’t conquer its shortcomings.
Financially, the $200 million budgeted Napoleon will need a blockbuster theatrical run to cover its expenses at the box office. While we can talk about how this is really a streaming movie from a studio that doesn’t care about ticket sales and so on — the same things said for Apple Studio’s Killer of the Flower Moon as well, which has grossed only $146 million worldwide after five weeks in release — I explained in a separate article today why I like to look at box office from many different angles, including the purely financial aspects of theatrical as a major important driver of cinema.
Tracking toward north of $20 million, Napoleon won’t beat Disney’s animated Wish this long Thanksgiving weekend, but there’s a chance it could still overperform slightly both domestically and globally. I won’t be surprised if it manages $25-30 million range, although I’m currently expecting in the $20-25 million range.
Longterm prospects are good, if Napoleon gets good audience reactions and can find its legs for the holiday weeks ahead and then get a boost from award season attention. While I expect Oppenheimer to dominate the Oscar nominations (and to win a host of statues, including probably Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, as well as Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, and more), I think Napoleon will will be in some conversations even though it probably faces long odds in most above the line categories. The point is, it will benefit from any buzz and certainly from any nods it scores.
Still, it won’t become a blockbuster anywhere near the level of success Oppenheimer enjoyed. This film isn’t expecting to put up those numbers, even though ironically it needs them far more than Nolan’s picture did, in light of total costs. If it tops $300 million, then I’ll be surprised. Indeed, I’d guess something closer to $200-250 million is in store, unless those international figures come in way above expectations.
This is an odd film to review, for many reasons. It is glaringly obvious I was watching only half of a movie, even if I hadn’t known a full-length version would mercifully appear on AppleTV later this year. The structure of the film is such that you just intuitively sense you’re only watching the backbones of a story, with connective tissue missing and much of the large-scale war sequencing feeling randomly inserted into a satire of royal history and love affairs.
I know I’m watching a particular battle and I recognize it’s particular role in the framework of Napoleon’s advance to power and ultimate downfall, but the choices of what to portray and how to portray it feel largely unexplored when removed from a larger and richer context that I assume (because watching the film, I was constantly aware of what was missing) appears in the finished vision.
Why are we watching this or that battle? What precisely are we meant to feel, beyond what we might otherwise experience watching an ambitious action-driven large-scale war sequence depicted in what we can only assume is a hyper-realistic manner?
It’s impressive in scale and depiction, but I’m honestly weary of watching movies or TV shows of any genre with two big armies crashing into one another in “dirt on the camera realism” scenes, because it’s rarely connected to anything meaningful in the story and is purely showing off big cool fights in what’s now a stereotypical manner.
Napoleon does this in top tier fashion, mind you. If you want those sorts of action sequences, you’ll find several to love here. But they feel disconnected from most of the rest of the film besides their literal technical place in the timeline of events. Otherwise, the movie is an absurdist comedy deconstructing a famous historic love story, yet it only hits only the highlights and robs its leads of greater potential in such a truncated form.
One situation will transpire, only to completely undo itself moments later and undercut whatever tension and crisis the story just spent time setting up. Again, I assume the 4 hour 10 minute version premiering on AppleTV+ includes greater exploration of the initial outcomes and then subsequent events leading to reversals, but that doesn’t save the theatrical version from the whiplash suffered from its rapid turns of direction at its own expense.
The engine driving this tale is Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine, which proceeds in an uncomfortable (to the point it often feels cringy, intentionally so) and humorous series of meetings and separations. Clumsy, fawning, and melodramatic to the point of farce, Phoenix’s portrayal of the romance is perhaps only a few slapstick pratfalls away from Charlie Chaplin. He becomes stoic and pompous when considering his war plans or implementing them. In both contexts, Phoenix brings an intentional lack of self-awareness that sells the characterization — historically accurate or not, it’s funny and well played.
Vanessa Kirby elevates an underdeveloped character by infusing her with the weariness of a woman who is all too familiar with the endless power struggles and rising or falling fortunes of someone like herself. Too often, Joséphine spends scenes alternating between lightly catching her breath in almost tearful, sorrowful surprise, and lightly catching her breath in bitter, knowing awareness. Her apparent power over Napoleon is narrow and largely depicted as manipulating his desire, usually with a satirical undercurrent. Otherwise, she is treated as almost a prop in this over-edited version of the film, given no room to act upon events or develop a deeper arc for herself.
Only the barest bones of the story survive when deprived of what makes those moments part of a life and of an era, when it becomes simply “this happened, and then this happened.” And it’s crazy that I’m saying this despite the film being 2 hours and 38 minutes long, which would normally be plenty of time to tell everything necessary for a story.
Had this been the story of his political rise and subsequent romance with Joséphine, with the battlefield exploits minimized in favor of keeping the story focused on the “home front” to maximize time spent on the personal relationship and daily leadership, then I think the satire would’ve landed better and the story would’ve felt more consistent even if chopped down to little more than half its intended length.
Likewise, a film focused on Napoleon’s rise through his wars and conquests, and his fall after his losses, could’ve relied on satirizing the nature of war in many ways while including related events in France around his marriage, coronation, and exile as they tied into and fed the larger focus on his battles.
But the mix of the two required streamlining both approaches so much that neither fully works on its own merits, and both lack the connectivity necessary work in tandem. It’s a disappointment precisely because there’s enough here to tell what’s missing, and to know how it could (and presumably does) solve so much of what doesn’t work in this theatrical version.
Not that I don’t sympathize with the impossible task of editing a 4 hour 10 minute historical satire of Napoleon down to just a little more than half its length, when it contains half a dozen major battle scenes and a large amount of romantic absurdist humor, not to mention multiple instances of taking power and losing power. (I mean, spoiler alert, but also not so much?)
I think this exercise demonstrates why the great strength of a filmmaker like Ridley Scott working with Apple Studios is the ability to pursue a creative vision like this unencumbered by runtime limitations and marketing demands, and that trying to make this strength coexist with a parallel need for theatrical release (and the necessary extreme editing entailed) is perhaps counterproductive.
Yes, I understand Scott wanted a theatrical release and Apple wants to make more of a splash in theatrical. I also realize a theatrical run helps promote the film when it comes exclusively to the streaming service in several weeks, not to mention making the film eligible for award consideration.
But much of this is about an inherent bias presuming films that don’t get theatrical releases aren’t as serious, or aren’t as high of quality, and maybe aren’t “real” cinema (as the accusation has literally been made, remember, more than once and by a lot of big-name filmmakers). I disagree with those notions, and think there might be more value these days in someone like Scott — who has for decades been keenly aware of the demands of theatrical release and needs of studios for streamlined versions of his films, a point that played a huge role in my reassessment of his film The Counselor — just making the movies he wants to make the way he wants to make them, and let them release in full glorious 4 hour versions exclusively on streaming.
This is ultimately a negative review, which makes me sad because I had (have) such high hopes for Napoleon. Yet I glimpse what I hope are the kernels of the full story Scott tells in his 4 hours-plus version, so I may wind up bright back here with a new review of the AppleTV+ version to proclaim love for it, just as happened with the filmmaker’s The Counselor adaptation.
Napoleon is lessened by being cut to pieces and turned into a smaller version of itself that gets to say less of what it was created to say. I can enjoy elements of it and say nothing in particular is outright “bad,” but so much of it misses its potential and feels like a series of short well-made clips that never fit together very well, and wind up feeling like they had very little to say anyway.