It has images that make you wish the big screen was even bigger, so as to properly encompass their scale and scope, and a pomp and circumstance that screams prestige even when the film itself can’t seem to conjure it. There are corpse-strewn battlefields, a cast of thousands, corsets galore, and expository intertitles in fancy-pants cursive. Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear. You sure as hell wouldn’t call it a pearl, either.

“The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” No one would accuse Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour epic (that’s the theatrical cut’s running time, mind you there’s a four-hour version waiting in the wings as well) about the French dictator’s rise and fall, of being thinly veiled autofiction in period dress. “All art is autobiographical,” Federico Fellini once said.

Napoleon total war