It Wasn’t This Year’s Most Acclaimed Historical Film—But Napoleon Has Something to Teach Viewers

 

As awards season heats up in Hollywood, one highly anticipated blockbuster film of 2023 will face the disappointing reality of being less decorated than its eponymous 18th century-born Corsican military hero. With four wins (including two satirical “Yoga” awards) and 39 nominations, to Oppenheimer’s more than 300 wins out of nearly 400 various nominations, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has apparently faced its Waterloo.

 

At the box office, Napoleon, with its almost three-hour runtime, has also fallen short. The film is listed as number 43 in the top-grossing films of 2023 behind PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Trolls Band Together (Box Office Mojo). Popular reviews of Napoleon hover between 2/5 (rogerebert.com), 58% (Rotten Tomatoes) and 6.4/10 (IMDb). British and U.S. film critics were mostly positive, while their French counterparts were unanimously disparaging. The right-wing newspaper Le Figaro compared Napoleon and Joséphine to “Barbie and Ken under the Empire.”

 

The movie reflects filmmaker Ridley Scott’s approach to the genre of historical epic, through which he creates a mirror to reflect, explore, and comment on the contemporary world of his audience. Historical inaccuracies abound, but do not matter. “Get a life!” blasts Scott to this kind of criticism. This is cinema where the story and the meaning for the audience have more value than strict adherence to facts, and where a little fiction may hold more truth than expected.