re: Napoleon

If you go in with low expectations and aren't looking for historical accuracy it's not bad.

They made him seem like an idiot and a cuck way too much, and more than that not terribly smart. In reality he was absolutely brilliant and that seemed to really get lost.

They spent a lot of time on the Josephine stuff which I get, it's Hollywood, it just screwed up the flow and since she died before Waterloo it really didn't work.

The battle scenes are great, did a good job of showing strategy and while somewhat graphic they weren't focused on just being gore either.

Mainly though they just didn't explain what was going on very well and tell the bigger picture. It was a like he just kind of showed up here or there randomly instead of really fleshing out the history and what was going on with France and the other powers. They flirted with it but it came out very jumbled and didn't really make sense.

Considering the crap that comes out of Hollywood today? It's pretty good. If you are looking for another Gladiator? Uh, no.

I was kind of disappointed in the film. I thought it did focus too much on his love life. I wanted more on the history and the wars. It did also paint him to be more of a lunatic and an idiot.

Yes, he was, but that was not who he was. He did not leave Egypt because his wife was sleeping with another man. He left Egypt to seize power.

They had fricked up relationship for sure, and they both cheated on the other, but his life did not revolve around her.

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I wanted more on the history and the wars.

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I think that’s my biggest complaint

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You know he was a cuck in real life, right?

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But is that why we remember him?

Won't be watching since it appears the movie was made with a typical Hollywood agenda.

Swore off Hollywood historical efforts, after The Kingdom of Heaven - also by Ridley Scott - a totally fictionalized account about the Crusaders against Saladin, in which Saladin was presented as all that is good with humankind and the Crusaders were depicted as racist trogs who should've stayed out the Holy Land and left that wonderful culture to its own devices.

With particularly extreme contempt and malice shown toward the Templars.

Curiously, Richard the Lion-hearted was given a minor role in the film even though Saladin respected his prowess above all others.

They obviously decided that showing the truth about his successes against Saladin didn't fit the narrative, since he was the Crusader who it is said at least achieved a stalemate against Saladin and would've eventually won against him had he not needed to leave the crusade to go back to his country to prevent his brother from taking over his reign.

Hear that they even made Oppenheimer into a sympathetic figure.

Anything good about Napoleon and his wars of vanity are in the minority.

His most notables were his incursion into Egypt with his successful Battle of the Pyramids and the look that the savants accompanying his expeditions gave the world of Egypt at the time with their amazing, detailed sketches they made of the area, especially within the Great Pyramid.

He even spent a night by himself in Cheops' burial chamber in which he experienced something so unusual - whether self-induced or not - in which he refused to go into detail about with his generals. Giving rise to much speculation over the centuries. Something even on his death bed he refused to tell, saying that "you wouldn't believe me anyway."

But according to Napoleon himself, it was his compilation and writing of the Civil Code that he admits he was most proud of, still used in Louisiana.

His most destructive action was against his own people.

He was singularly responsible for that small country, France, having lost over 600,000 of its best men in his vanity wars.

Did they really have that much left to even get involved in WWI and II.

While he was establishing his "empire" it surely allowed him to be absent conveniently from France during the Reign of Terror when the Jacobins Robespierre and Saint Just were sending all those innocent people to the guillotine.

Napoleon had been associated with the murderous Jacobins, so it was a prudent move for him to be away from it all while the blood was flowing. They executed about 17,000 people in a country that could least afford such a loss.

Until it was Robespierre's and Saint Just's turn to walk up those steps. It's said that Saint Just was in line right behind Robespierre and cried like a baby at what he was about to face.

Napoleon was even arrested for treason after the end of the Reign of Terror.

But apparently he had a charisma that just wouldn't quit, which few leaders have been able to boast of over the centuries.

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What separated him from other general's on the battlefield? I'm curious...

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1. Timing. Can't say it better than that guy had the best military timing of all time.

2. Contingencies, and not just for negatives.
A) He never really assumed he was going to win so always planned for worst case.
B) he often got "double whammys" out of success because he always planned for the exploitation of any succes.

Often his contingency for failure was the same as for success (e.g. light calvary held in close reserve, hidden, to cover the retreat of artillery if bad and wreak havoc on any breakthrough). It was his use of timing in deployment of that contingency that brought it together.

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I think you might need to brush up on crusader history baw, pretty stupid rant against Kingdom of Heaven.

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I think YOU might need to brush up on yours, my friend. Talk to any historian of the Crusades and they will tell you that Kingdom of Heaven is a particularly inaccurate portrayal of the time period. And while I can't speak to the corruption and power hungry mistakes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem before the fall of the city to Saladin, I do know for a fact that the Archbishop of Jerusalem was done dirty by Ridley Scott. He's portrayed as a sniveling coward when in point of fact he was instrumental in the defense of the city as well as the ransoming of Christians after the city's fall to prevent them from falling into slavery.

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There are zero tits

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All I needed to know, will not be watching,thanks man.