For every dad furious that there still hasn’t been a sequel to Master and Commander, the wait got a little easier with the news that Ridley Scott was making a Napoleon movie. Joaquin Phoenix plays the titular emperor, and today brings us the first trailer for Scott’s epic, fabulously expensive-looking Napoleon, set to open this Thanksgiving.
With a screenplay by David Scarpa (All the Money in the World, The Last Castle) Napoleon will be Ridley Scott’s first feature since his twin releases of 2021, The Last Duel and House of Gucci. It will also mark the first time Scott and Phoenix have worked together since Gladiator made him a star 23 years ago. A virtual unknown before his star-making turn as Commodus, that film earned Phoenix the first of his four Oscar nominations, finally winning one for playing the evil clown in Todd Phillips’ Joker. Scott, 85, has also been nominated four times–three as director, for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and Blackhawk Down, and once for best picture, for The Martian, never winning. In Napoleon, his 28th feature, Scott takes on a subject who has long inspired many an acclaimed auteur, including Stanley Kubrick, who had a Napoleon movie in development in 1969 before his financiers backed out.
Produced by Sony with Apple, the official synopsis describes Napoleon as “a spectacle-filled action epic that details the checkered rise and fall of the iconic French Emperor…showcasing his visionary military and political tactics against some of the most dynamic practical battle sequences ever filmed.”
Vanessa Kirby plays Napoleon’s wife Josephine, and the couple’s Rushmore-esque meet-cute serves as the anchor scene of the trailer, in between Napoleon’s rise during the Revolution and subsequent battlefield triumphs. “What is this costume you have on,” Josephine asks Napoleon.
“This is my uniform. I led the French victory at Toulon,” Napoleon answers, in an exchange oddly reminiscent of the “that’s a nice nurse’s uniform, Guy,” scene from Rushmore.
As for Josephine’s punk rock-chic hairstyle in the clip, the scene seems to be set at one of Paris’ bals à la victime (victims’ balls), supposedly celebrated in the days following the Reign of Terror. As Transcript described them, “The balls were something of an urban legend in Paris, with very little to no first-hand accounts of the events remaining today. Functioning as a tribute to the dead, the rumored gatherings had a specific dress code. Many women wore red chokers or ribbons around their necks, to symbolize the slice of the guillotine’s blade. Men and women alike had their hair cropped short at the neck, as the victims did before execution to ensure the blade would sever the head without any complications.”
Basically, the rich kids all got together to party while dressed like guillotine victims, among whom would’ve numbered friends, relatives, and often parents, which seems like peak Frenchness. (It’s worth noting that Napoleon himself was from the island of Corsica, where he grew up speaking Italian, with a surname originally written as “Buonaparte.”)
From there, the trailer mostly follows Napoleon and his successes on the battlefields, from the pyramids of Egypt to the snowy fields of… Russia? As Master and Commander might have put it in its famous opening crawl, “Napoleon is master of Europe. The battlefields are now battlefields.”
“You think you are great?” Kirby’s Josephine whispers in the coda. “You are just a tiny little brute, that is nothing without me.”
Indeed as Scott described the project to Deadline, “Napoleon is a man I’ve always been fascinated by. He came out of nowhere to rule everything — but all the while he was waging a romantic war with his adulterous wife Josephine. He conquered the world to try to win her love, and when he couldn’t, he conquered it to destroy her, and destroyed himself in the process.”