You can’t treat it as a normal movie with anything contextualized or explained. Nope. Rather think of it as a crazed male fantasy (the director’s? Certainly not mine) about one particular way of living, presented large and vivid on the screen, with sex scenes too. The fantasy doesn’t even have Napoleon as an especially smart guy, which of course he was. The battles scenes for Austerlitz and Waterloo are some of the best ever filmed. I can’t bring myself to call it “a good movie,” but it was better than expected and I was never tempted to leave.
