Napoleon in the Context of Ridley Scott's Body of Work

A few months ago I asked here whether Ridley Scott's Napoleon might not, like Oppenheimer, surprise us by making a major hit of the unlikely material of a historical biography. I concluded that the chances of that were slight--and a month and a half after the film's release the issue appears settled, with Napoleon a weak box office performer, and no critical darling. (The movie's worldwide gross is just over $200 million--guaranteeing that the movie will have to do fairly well in home entertainment just to break even on its big budget--while with a critical score of 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the precedent of the Golden Globes behind us, I would not expect to see the backers compensated for their financial disappointment with little statuettes.)

As it happens, this is not the first time this has happened to Scott, who having his career in an era in which period pieces are tough sells to audiences, has nevertheless made quite the habit of such pieces, and indeed of full-blown historical epics--and much more often than not failed with them commercially and critically, after which they tended to pass into obscurity. (Remember the quincentennial-of-Columbus'-first-voyage-marking 1492: The Conquest of Paradise? Kingdom of Heaven? Robin Hood? His do-over of the Biblical book of Exodus? Or even 2021's The Last Duel?)

Gladiator was Scott's only real "win" with the historical epic--an exception in the career of a director whose artistic standing rests mainly on his work on other genres--notably the renown he got for two of the classics of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom (Alien and Blade Runner while his credibility as a director able to at least deliver commercial success rests on later films in that genre (like the rather lousy Alien prequel Prometheus, and the adaptation of The Martian), and the crime genre (with high on the list of his more successful films here Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Hannibal and the only marginally period '70s-set American Gangster and All the Money in the World), as along with a couple of war films with contemporary or at least very recent settings (G.I. Jane and Black Hawk Down).

Yet Scott kept going back to the historical genre (one reason why we have not only got Napoleon but will be getting a sequel to Gladiator that absolutely no one asked for), in spite of what Gladiator unintentionally demonstrated--and what even the fawning puff pieces for his new film affirm again and again in spite of themselves--that Scott simply has no real interest in history, let alone anything interesting to say about it. Gladiator pretty much offered a standard B-movie action plot--super-soldier who served his country faithfully and brilliantly is betrayed by an evil Establishment type, forcing him to get revenge, which he does (because "This time, it's personal!")--with this only looking different because of the novelty of the period trappings, and the extreme lavishness of the production, and the whiff of WWE about the proceedings, while good an action film as it was, from the standpoint of historical drama it was risible. And Napoleon, certainly to go by the remarks of Michael Roberts, George Marlowe and David Walsh, seems little better (while its extreme conventionality of perspective is rather more obvious).

So why does Scott keep coming back to the genre? Alas, Scott's answers to his interlocutors notoriously present the reader with more arrogance, flippancy, verbal abuse and "unprintable" vulgarity than they do insight (as, in a reminder that the entertainment press consists so largely of idiot suck-ups to the rich and famous who would be ashamed of themselves if they had a normal human capacity for shame, many of its members absolutely celebrate him for it). Left to guess as a result, my guess, for whatever it may be worth, is that Scott, who has always been more impressive on the level of spectacle than storytelling or ideas (indeed, it is visual style that people seem to remember most from even his most acclaimed work), simply likes presenting historical spectacle on the screen; likes managing these big productions with their vast casts and costuming and the rest that gives them their visual impact; likes, maybe, the thought of doing something we associate with the old-time Great Directors in Hollywood's Golden Age than the filmmakers of today.* And his standing in the film world is such that he gets a chance to do so every few years, in spite of the poor track record of the results at the box office.

* Where the limits of Scott at even his best are concerned I find it worth citing Kevin Martinez's review of the sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, in which he had occasion to remark what he saw as the earlier film's rarely remarked weaknesss. While calling the original "visually distinguished" he also found it "narratively cold, meandering and dull," specifically noting among its "most irritating aspects . . . its murky, chiaroscuro lighting . . . plodding pace . . . overall dreary, depressed atmosphere" (as these were, in his view unfortunately, carried over into the sequel) in a film that was "more of an accomplishment in production design than in cinema."