Napoleon, by Ridley Scott

Despite the gore and the sense of realism, bodies, objects and spaces are sketches of things. The film is a fetishistic exhibition of costumes and sets that would fit well into a wax museum calendar, generating queues of curious people to “see what it was like” but, in the end, just admiring a pile of dead flesh and objects embalmed by the spectacle.

A historical film without historicity. Revolution is a catharsis of horror. Republic and monarchy are just empty words. It’s the perfect “centre politics film” that sees opposite poles of political spectrum — far right and far left — just as two sides of the same coin.

Cinema is capable of bringing imagination to life, bringing History — in its full sense — to the fore. John Ford understood that the Wild West in his films was a space of “transcreation” between what was and what could be. Glauber Rocha made history a spiral twisting between past, present and future. Manoel de Oliveira tells history like a novel being written in front of the viewer.

Napoleon is not history, he does not create or tell people’s lives. He does not (re)create or (re)build worlds. He neither understands nor dances with time. It’s a static and apathetic film.

It impresses me how the entire technical and financial apparatus of American cinema can generate such an anodyne film. I didn’t expect to see a decal of a historical figure worse than Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Ridley Scott: congratulations.