I just booked tickets for this new Ridley Scott Movie. Anyone who knows me at all well will know I’m a bit of a Napoleonic history nutter.
Ridley Scott’s first film feature movie was the wonderful The Duellists*, released in 1977. This is far and away my favourite Scott movie, so far. Yes, Alien and Gladiator are brilliant entertainment. But The Duellists is a work of art and love that the directors’ more commercial movies fail to match.
* Based on a Joseph Conrad short story, which in turn was based on a real life story.
So… Scott is returning, it would appear, to a true personal passion. Will this translate into a movie that might equal or outdo his earlier foray into this most exciting and colourful era?
He now has, thanks to modern digital technology, the ability to recreate epic scenes that he didn’t have, back when he started out. Will this enhance the end product?
One imagines that it must inevitably do so. But modern cinema as a whole illustrates perfectly, to me at any rate, that grand spectacle alone can very often and very easily be utterly empty and meaningless.
The casting is obviously massively important. Will Joaquin Phoenix cut it? I guess we’ll find out fairly soon. How will they deal with the transition from the lean and hungry youth, to corpulent and balding ‘little corporal’?
From the numerous stills I’ve scene, and the simple one word title, one assumes this movie will attempt to tell most of all of the subject’s story. That’s a mammoth undertaking! One that has defeated everyone from Thomas Hardy (with his massive ‘unstageable’ play, The Dynasts), in the 19th C., to Abel Gance and Stanley Kubrick, in the 20th.
Gance famously blew his entire budget – intending a complete six-part telling of Napoleon’s life – only getting as far as the first instalment (youth and the conquest of Italy), and making a film almost as hard show or to watch as it was to make.
Kubrick, meanwhile, assembled an incredible preparatory archive – subsequently published in book form by Taschen, something that surely Ridley Scott will have drawn upon? – yet failed to make the film itself.
Checking in on the latter reveals that Spielberg and HBO might be planning to complete this. Read more about that tantalising possibility here.
I have to confess, I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious about the prospect of actually seeing this film, which I’ve been aware of for about a year or so now.
I’ll post again when we actually go see it…