Ridley Scott has done it again. The master of director’s cuts, who for decades has managed to get sci-fi nerds fiercely debating which of the seven (!) different versions of Blade Runner reigns supreme, is unleashing the beast of the genre: a whopping four-hour edition of his new Joaquin Phoenix-starring historical epic Napoleon, which will be released on Apple TV+ after its current theatrical run.
Actually, the longer cut will run 4 hours and 10 minutes, according to Scott, still making cinematic mischief at 85 years old. “I’m working on it,” the director recently teased of his latest behemoth edit. “It was four [hours] 10 [minutes] this morning.” That’s an extra 92 minutes of footage beyond what exists now, which is not exactly brief at 2 hours and 38 minutes. In other words, this is a film on top of a film.
If that sounds unbearably protracted and exhausting, you’re hardly alone in thinking so. Many bladders were tested during this year’s acclaimed, three-hour-plus Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, by the capital-I Important filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, respectively. I thought both were brilliant, and deeply in need of a proper intermission. (Instead, Scorsese and company have cracked down on theaters inserting their own intermissions.) That and the bloat of many Marvel blockbusters have led to investigations by The Economist, Vanity Fair, and NPR, which all basically found that, yeah, movies really are longer these days (though we’ve gone through previous waves of way-long hit films).
Joaquin Phoenix in 'Napoleon.'
Kevin Baker/Apple TV+But the correct length, of course, is always up to interpretation. As Roger Ebert once put it, “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.” While Napoleon might be baggy for, say, a romantic comedy, epics tend to be epic for a reason. Scott’s biopic condenses more than three decades in the life and career of Napoleon Bonaparte—from his initial rise during the French Revolution in 1789 to crowning himself Emperor of the French in 1804 to his exile and eventual death in 1821.
It’s a whole lot of story to tell. And that’s the problem with the current Napoleon. To be clear, it is never boring. Between the realistically gruesome battle scenes and Phoenix’s amusingly petulant, if ahistorical, take on the dictator (with not even a hint of a French accent), I didn’t look at my watch once. (Among Phoenix’s better bons mots: “You think you’re so great just because you have boats!” And, when called fat: “I enjoy my meals.”) It’s horrifying and surprisingly hilarious, in equal measure.
But if it’s possible for an epic to feel truncated, Napoleon is that. Scott is really trying to tell two stories at once, which barely overlap: There is Napoleon the shrewd commander, leading thousands of men into almost certain death in battle as he conquers a large part of the world. And then there is Napoleon the lover, whose relationship to his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby) turns out to be its own tumultuous game of one-upmanship.
Slate’s Dana Stevens put her finger on what’s wrong: “It sounds strange to say that a 2-hour-and-38-minute-long epic like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels rushed, but even a runtime that capacious proves too short for this ambitious but muddled film.”
Muddle is exactly right. Those meticulously staged battle sequences, featuring hundreds of actors and quite a few horses (warning: often depicted as dead), and shot both close-up and in sweeping aerial views, are stunning to behold. But they also lack a human presence beyond Phoenix’s cajoling of his soldiers, none of whom become full-fledged characters.
Likewise, the hot-then-cold-then-hot-again domestic interplay between Phoenix and Kirby, with plenty of kinky sex, is a wild ride but never totally coheres. Kirby is a magnetic performer, but it’s hard to tell whether her Joséphine ever really loves Bonaparte, or if she likes then loves him, or is by turns revolted and charmed by him and finally completely committed, or some mix of the above.
Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix behind the scenes in 'Napoleon.'
Aidan Monaghan/Apple TV+Scott has been in this mess before. Of those seven Blade Runner iterations, the theatrical version always struck me as aesthetically audacious but also kind of a standard cop thriller. The 1992 director’s cut made me fall in love with a movie that had been merely likable. While the original’s semi-hopeful ending felt vague and tacked-on, this more open-ended cut deepened the ambiguity of Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) journey, planting more hints that the replicant assassin might be a replicant himself.
The 2007 Blade Runner Final Cut preferred by Scott deepened the uncertainty further (all those unicorns!), while adding extra visual polish and restoring more violent moments that heightened the sense of sorrow. It took 25 years to get there, but it was worth the wait.
Yet it took two later director’s cuts to cement Scott’s status as the king of this admittedly niche form. The 2005 swords-and-sandals Kingdom of Heaven starring Orlando Bloom is mostly forgotten now, but true fans know to hunt down the 50-minute-longer and far more sophisticated version that Scott released later that year. This contemplative cut revealed the religious conflict at the story’s heart (it’s also, in the tradition of Scott’s extended cuts, very bloody).
Still, it wasn’t until Scott made a spectacular box office bomb that I became devoted to his prolonged cuts. The Counselor was panned by critics and dismissed by audiences in 2013, despite the stacked cast (Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz) and the fact that it was the first and only produced screenplay by Cormac McCarthy. (Yes, that Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy.) A stark look at one naive man’s (Fassbender) descent into the cartel drug trade and the nihilism that undoes him, The Counselor was maybe always too cold for the mall cineplex crowd. But the shorter theatrical cut did Scott’s direction a disservice.
The editing of the Counselor Unrated Extended Version, which came out the following year and has found cult appeal, is purposeful. While nothing pivotal to the plot was left out in the 20 excised minutes, this longer cut honors the elliptical, expansive quality of McCarthy’s writing, and creates the atmosphere that makes this version so chilling. The dull moments make the surprising moments (including a certain vicious Brad Pitt beheading) that much more shocking.
I plan to watch the four-hour Napoleon as if it were a miniseries (which maybe it should have been all along), though Apple and Scott (a die-hard arbiter of cinema) probably won’t present it that way. That’s OK. I’ll find a break after each hour or so—perhaps every time Bonaparte wins or loses a major battle, or when Phoenix makes weird panting noises indicating that he wants to screw. There’s no lack of titanic shifts for the character, and for history.
And I’m hoping this new Napoleon will clear up certain mystifying plot points that the current version glosses over. For example, did you know that Joséphine was actually six years older than Bonaparte, whereas Kirby is 14 years younger than Phoenix? It adds crucial context to help understand the unusual power dynamic and fertility issues that come off as abrupt.
Even if the absurdly egotistical Bonaparte, aptly lambasted by Scott and Phoenix, doesn’t deserve all that added attention, it might at least do justice for his dear Joséphine, whose death literally occurs offscreen in the current version. Scott has hinted as much. It could even be called the Josephine Cut. Having been highly entertained but also stupefied by the Napoleon in theaters, I can’t wait to stream it.
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