This is part 7 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career.
After 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick wanted to go back to his roots of was movies (Paths of Glory and Spatacus), but this time with an epic biopic about Napoléon Bonaparte. This was to become his biggest unfinished project, mostly due to the prohibitive production costs.
By some fluke, the script and production notes leaked on the Internet, and while there is no sure guarantee that this is authentic, it not only fits Kubrick's style perfectly, but also has just too much craftsmanship to be a simple forgery from a fan.
So, assuming the leaked script is original, I read it as if I was watching a 180-minutes long movie. How is it?
Well, overall, it's a big spectacle. It has lots of sex, violence, battle scenes and gore. Examples: Live sex acts as entertainment in a Paris cabaret; "Maximum erotica" in a bedroom with mirrors for walls; A barn full of soldiers and horses burned alive while people outside use the flame to cook horse flesh; Headshots at point-blank range. All of that with somptuous castles, beautiful costumes and amazing vistas.
The chemistry between Napoléon and Josephine is maybe just as weird and somewhat unbelieveable as its real historical equivalent, but what that means is that I felt too distanced from it to even care. There is almost too much exposition and attention to battle strategy, but again while the battles were amazing the strategy didn't feel too interesting to me.
In the end it was interesting, but it lacks a strong original idea to make it worthwhile the large investment to produce. What I'm trying to say is that all other (released) movies from Kubrick brought something thematically new or interesting, while for Napoléon it would have been some kind of excessive but unnecessary extravaganza. Seen from another perspective, it may have been a good thing for Kubrick to focus on smaller-budgeted movies as it focused him more on originality than simple sheer ambition. That way, he just avoided making the exact same mistake as Napoléon himself.
One last note: The production notes talk about some of his clever way to catalogue the sheer amounts of research he had to do (and that he's famous for). I wonder how he would have fared with today's computers and their search engines...
Published on May 30, 2012 at 21:16 EDT
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