Martin Scorsese isn’t the only legendary octogenarian film director with an expensive, historic passion project being funded by Apple this fall. Ridley Scott, who celebrated his 85th birthday in 2022 and has knocked out seven feature films in the past decade, will bring his Life of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to cinemas in November. Judging by the first trailer, it’s got all the horse-based warfare, dodgy accents, and (check notes) Radiohead trailercore you could want from a Ridley Scott historical epic.
It also has two things in particular abundance. The first is Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix), history’s most important short king, who is ignored by Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine (“You’re just a little brute who’s nothing without me”). He seems to like it. The second is Napoleon blowing things up with cannons. The first thing he shoots bloody with a cannon is an unruly crowd of plebs. Then he blows up some warships – probably British ones, though the trailer doesn’t specify. Then he shoots up one of the great pyramids of Giza. Then he blasts into a frozen lake with an enemy army on it… but wait, wait a minute. Did Napoleon basically just shooting a pyramid?
How much freedom is taken here by Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa? (Scarpa worked with Scott on All the money in the world and will work with him again next year gladiatorial 2.) Well, Napoleon invaded Egypt and he fought a great battle within sight of the pyramids in 1798. It appears that he personally visited the pyramids, although my googling turned up no record of him shooting them with a cannon. It is also reasonable to assume that over the course of the past 225 years, someone would have noticed that the top of one of the pyramids had been blown away.
Come this charming demystification of Napoleon’s Time in Egypt by historical novelist Shannon Selin, Scott and Scarpa confuse the real Battle of the Pyramids with a myth that Napoleon’s troops fired from the nose of the Sphinx during target practice. According to Selin’s research, what actually happened when Napoleon visited this wonder of the world was less destructive and almost adorable nerdy. Bonaparte challenged some of his party to climb a pyramid; the winner was a mathematician named Gaspard Monge, who shared a sip of brandy with his rivals as they reached the top. Then Napoleon calculated that the stones of the pyramids could be used to build a 10-foot wall around all of France, a calculation that Monge supposedly verified. But by then he had already consumed a little brandy.
It might have been nice to see that on screen as well. But Scott knows a bombastic visual metaphor when he sees one, and with these scenes showing Napoleon graduating from using his phallus weapons to vaporize revolutionaries to using them to attack the very embodiment of history itself, makes he certainly gets his point across.
Plus it looks sick. Napoleon hits theaters November 22.