Ridley Scott has been typically dismissive of critics taking issue with his forthcoming movie Napoleon, particularly French ones.
While his big-screen epic, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the embattled French emperor with Vanessa Kirby as his wife Josephine, has earned the veteran director plaudits in the UK, French critics have been less gushing, with Le Figaro saying the film could have been called “Barbie and Ken under the Empire,” French GQ calling the film “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally clumsy” and Le Point magazine quoting biographer Patrice Gueniffey calling the film “very anti-French and pro-British.”
Asked by the BBC to respond, Scott replied with customary swagger:
“The French don’t even like themselves. The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it.”
The film’s world premiere took place in the French capital this week.
Scott added he would say to historians questioning the accuracy of his storytelling:
“Were you there? Oh you weren’t there. Then how do you know?”
Because the people who were there wrote it down, and now we can read it. Scott’s line of reasoning is inherently inconsistent because if followed it would mean we have to evidence of Napoleon Bonaparte existing in the first place. Boy is Ridley Scott going to feel dumb when he realizes he made a biopic of a mythical character combined from the real stories of several French generals after the revolution—if there even was a French Revolution, I mean, we weren’t there.
Is there anything more embarrassing than people who think they know better than historians and reject the entire discipline of historiography? It’s like being anti-vax but extended to everything you don’t personally see.
He made the same arguments about Gladiator back in the day, pretty much word for word.
Thing is, it works for Gladiator. I have no idea how well it works here.
Well gladiator isn’t named after one of the most documented people in history, so probably not as well.
Basically all we know about him is that his name is Maximus Decimus Meridius. Father to a murdered child, husband to a murdered wife, and he will have his vengeance; in this life or the next.
Which brings to mind something one of my history teachers taught us about the implausibility of that movie. The main characters name is essentially “Most Tenth Middle”.
Quite the heroic name.
“Maximus” and “Decimus” were both real Roman names, but they wouldn’t have been used in that order. It would have been Decimus Meridius Maximus. Or something else in the middle, since I can’t find at instances of Romans called Meridius
Hey I didn’t know this - thank you for the information.
Coming next summer in Gladiator 2: The Resurrectioning
Gladiator 2: The Electric Resurrectoloo
Well, uhm… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_2
I mean… sure, it’s not named after him, but Marcus Aurelius is in that movie. They still have a column in his memory in Rome today.
On the minus side, he’s in the movie just for a little bit and you can’t really prove that he wasn’t murdered by Commodus in a fit of jealous rage. On the plus column, Napoleon is already one of the most misrepresented historical figures, so… call it a tie?
Ok but it seems some of the complaints were that it’s anti French. My argument there is that the French were indeed the bad guys in this period in history, and so was Napoleon, so no shit the movie is anti French of the period.
Dude is almost 90, at that age logic goes out the window. He is already one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood, he got nothing to lose.
Someone ask Keanu