Director Ridley Scott cuts the world’s most famous short person down to size — but it’s not clear why. Is it because, as the endnote informs us, his campaigns of glorious conquest killed millions of his own people? Then why isn’t that a theme throughout the film, instead of being mentioned via subtitles once and once in dialogue? Is it because history counts him among the great military leaders of all time, but really, he was actually a bit of a blunderer who will be best remembered for his failures in Russia and at Waterloo? Then maybe we should have gotten more of the greatness, so that the blunders would feel like a corrective. (The victory at Austerlitz is, admittedly, the highlight of the film: the gradually unfolding attack is thrilling, and the sequence of the standard bearer being shelled as he dashes across the ice on his horse is wondrous to behold — and one of the few places where color actually registers in this relentless dim and dun movie.) Or is it, as seems most likely from the presentation, that the two-time Emperor — so beloved that all he had to do was ask the people to return him to power and voila — was an insecure mama’s boy who was buoyed more than he rose, clumsy and callow while others were clever and calculating, and who transferred his maternal devotion to his rather mercenary wife? (She is never more earnest when she begs him, “Just please don’t leave me,” because of course, it’s good to be Empress.) Joaquin Phoenix seems miscast in the lead, or maybe just misdirected. He came across as smaller in The Master; here, we need a visual gag with a mummified Pharaoh to establish his shorta fides. And while he gives good sullen scowl, he never manages to give us a figure of sufficient stature to be worth caring about one way or the other. And if that’s Scott’s point...well okay, but again, why make the movie? (2023) — Matthew Lickona
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