At times, this feels like Ridley Scott in top form, directing sweeping, epic historical battles. At times, it feels like an absurdist black comedy à la The Great. (My entire theater lost it at "You think you're so great because you have BOATS!") But most of the time, it feels like an entire season of television hopelessly compressed into 2.5 hours. As a result, I understood little and cared even less. Maybe the 4-hour cut will be better, but I doubt it. The sheer number of things it touches on - characters, political maneuvers, relationships, battles - seems like it would take 10 hours to cover properly. "Destiny has brought me here. Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!"

Like a tour of the optometrist's: there's a lot of grind and not enough spectacles. Ridley Scott made the dubious decision to focus the lens of Napoleon Bonaparte's biopic on his love life rather than his military expertise and failures. So, instead of examining his expansion into the Americas and the political savior faire required to unify a divided France (by, for example, naming the Place des Vosges in Paris after the first French region to send taxes to the empire), we get overlong scenes of him having bad sex with his wife while both of them wear all the clothes. Not to mention, and I won't because I'm alone in this, that the movie is made entirely in English, which is the intellectual equivalent of watching a civil war movie where the North and the South run around speaking German. Nope, sadly, instead of a film worthy of an emperor we get a pile of reenactments based on some famous paintings.

I want to watch that opening scene on repeat. But in the 2.5 hour version of this movie, I failed to make any connection to any of the characters. So watching it, it was just a bunch of stuff happening. I felt no investment or reason to feel anything during good times nor bad for any of the characters. Those things were just things happening. Hopefully the 4+ hour version of this movie fixes that, because as it stands I was expecting more. This movie is a bit of a let down.

Basically a 2hr 30min montage!

Great but not fantastic. Full marks for the battle scenes, costumes, sets and attention to detail plus the fact Ridley filmed this movie in 62 days. It held my attention and was not dull by any means. However, it didn’t quite hit the mark with me, as much as The Last Duel or Gladiator. Rushed? Possibly. Having said that, perhaps the extra hour in the director’s cut on Apple TV+ will fill those holes for me. Undeniably a Ridley Scott movie of epic proportions. 7/10