After the trailer dropped for Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his new historical biopic about every middle-aged rich guy's favourite tiny tyrant, TV historian Dan Snow posted a video on TikTok taking to task a handful of minor historical inaccuracies he'd noticed, as a recent New Yorker profile of Scott notes. Marie Antoinette's hair was actually cropped when she was executed, for one — in the movie, her actress has long, frizzy locks — and Napoleon wasn't even there IRL, as the trailer depicts. Then, at the Battle of the Pyramids during his army's campaign in Egypt, Napoleon never targeted the pyramids themselves. He might've presided over hundreds of thousands of wartime deaths, but he drew the line at iconoclasm.
Asked about this viral fact checking, Scott offered an appropriately curt response: “Get a life.”
Fastidious, CinemaSins-esque handwringing is irritating in and of itself, evocative of the “I hope someone got fired for that blunder” guy from The Simpsons, whose whole point of existing in the show is to demonstrate how not to engage with art, or people in social settings generally.
But what about historical accuracy more broadly? Well, it's kind of obvious that movies will always necessitate a level of artistic license, as a medium in which both real and fictitious events are compacted down to two-hour-plus stories. That might mean minor anachronisms to promote narrative clarity. That might mean that the eponymous subject of Napoleon pops up somewhere he didn't as far as history shows. It might also mean that Antoinette wears her hair down when she gets her head chopped off. (Next you'll be telling us that she never wore Converse.)
But who really cares?
It would be different if Napoleon bashed us over the head with its bowing to the historical record, but if Scott's own scoffing irreverence wasn't clue enough already, it's obviously not a film that cares much for the “bio” bit in biopic. Like other blockbuster epics of its ilk — think: Braveheart, 300 — it has been marketed as anything but appropriate for A-level revision. The trailers suggest that it will dig a little into Napoleon's interiority — for example, the word “lover” is one of the trailer's epically overlaid adjectives, which leads me to presume that he will be depicted as a bit of a conflicted fuck boy — as interpreted by Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa. But is there anything here to make us think that it screams cerebral history lesson?
The true story of Napoleon is but epic framework on which to build the greatest fireworks display you've ever laid your eyes on. This is a movie that wants to do one thing, primarily, which is to give us lots of big, spectacular battles, with digitally reproduced hordes of extras being blown to bits by cannons, or skewered on the end of cutlasses. It's going to give us stylish slo-mo shots of Napoleon gazing sternly over the battlefield, unmoved by the endless fields of limbless RADA twinks writhing in the frosty mud. It's going to give us many, many horses. So many goddamn horses.
If you want to know the cold, hard historical facts, consult a book. Or even a well-made documentary. (As for Napoleon himself, there are thousands of antiquity-obsessed Guys for that, like Connor Roy.) This is essentially to echo star Joaquin Phoenix who, asked about the historical accuracy of Napoleon by Empire magazine over the summer, said: “If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should probably do your own studying and readying. Because if you see this film, it's this experience told through Ridley's eyes.”
Besides, it's not as though Scott and the team behind Napoleon haven't put in the research. According to Variety, in the five days spent recreating the Battle of Waterloo, they went so far as to replicate the way British soldiers trained to wield their bayonets, waving them at the French to scare them off (which is, surprisingly, not a euphemism). So this isn't a question of eschewing history for the sake of it. It's about elevating entertainment — finger-pinching, handwaving-like-an-excited-Italian cinema! — as historical epics traditionally have, over dusty biography. Hardly anyone will queue up for Napoleon in hopes of watching a true-to-life biopic so much as a spectacular battle-fest, in the same way that barely anyone bought tickets for Gladiator expecting reverence for the historical record but to see Russell Crowe scrap with a tiger.
The adage is old for a reason: don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. Which is why, when Napoleon's Sphinx is battered into oblivion by cannon balls, I will stand and applaud.
