The Epic: Napoleon (Dir Ridley Scott, 2h35m, 2023)
Napoleon Bonaparte is no stranger to the Epic. The shadow of the Corsican stretches, at grand scale, over film as a whole, but as the protagonist, or villain of cinematic epics, he has no rival. There is Gance's magnificent silent epic (1927), surviving thanks to its subsequent restoration by the film historian Kevin Brownlowe, Guitry’s Napoleon (1955), best seen in its three hour French cut, King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956), in which Herbert Lom's Napoleon towers and glowers, Gance's return to Napoleonic cinema in Austerlitz (1960), that bizarrely cameos Orson Welles, and the film that arguably killed the historical Epic, 1970's Waterloo, and Stanley Kubrick's unrealised and meticulously researched project, perhaps the greatest of all lost films. The Epic in 2023 is a strange place to explore Napoleon, yet, here we find Ridley Scott once more, directing Napoleon, an epic film sandwiched between two other ...
