Over 23 years since Gladiator gobbled up five Academy Awards, director Ridley Scott and actor Joaquin Phoenix have reunited for another historical epic. This time, we’re jumping over to France in the late 1700s to tell the story of Napoleon Bonaparte, the military leader who rose to become emperor of France.
Now the first trailer has dropped, and much like Napoleon’s life, it's quite stressful.
According to the official synopsis, the movie is “an original and personal look at Napoleon’s (played by Phoenix) origins and his swift, ruthless climb to emperor, viewed through the prism of his addictive and often volatile relationship with his wife and one true love, Josephine” who is played by Vanessa Kirby, who stars alongside Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles and Ludivine Sagnier. The film will cover Napoleon's famous battles, “relentless ambition and astounding strategic mind as an extraordinary military leader and war visionary”.
Along all the war-mongering, there’s a nod to Napoleon’s small stature in the trailer – Josephine tells him: “you’re just a tiny little brute who’s nothing without me” – and those who wondered if Phoenix would be walking around on his knees will be surprised to hear that the pair aren’t so different in height after all.
Napoleon was registered as standing at around 5 foot 5, or 168 cm, the average height for a man at the time. It was the cartoonist James Gillray, who drew caricatures of him as a small man bursting into toddler tantrums, who was mainly responsible for his diminutive reputation. According to History.com, the pictures were so popular that “Napoleon said that Gillray ‘did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down’.” Phoenix, in comparison, is 5 foot 8 inches, or 178 cm.
The film is the first of two big productions based on the life and times of Napoleon. As reported earlier this year, Steven Spielberg is also said to be working on his own TV series that’s been adapted from an abandoned Stanley Kubrick script. According to Variety: “The director confirmed that he’s working on a seven-part limited series for HBO based on Stanley Kubrick’s unmade feature film Napoleon.”
Napoleon is on general release from November 22.
