Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" is a dud

Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" is a boring movie. Its primary problem is that it sees Napoleon Bonaparte almost exclusively through the lens of his relationship with his first wife, Josephine. Another problem is that the movie attempts to cram 28 years in 2.5 hours. The history is rushed while the story drags.

The scenes with Josephine are excruciatingly boring, and the uninspired, unimaginative, and frankly uninteresting battle scenes don't compensate.

There are two structural reason for why nothing in the movie resonates.

1) There is no real plot, just a bunch of things that happen until the movie mercifully ends.

2) Nobody in the movie matters, somehow not even Napoleon. There are no stakes, nothing for the audience to care about.

Compare the dullness of Napoleon to the compelling German movie "Downfall" which is about the last days of Adolph Hitler. "Downfall" invests in characters surrounding Hitler. For them there are stakes - moral, physical, psychological. Hitler's words, actions, and inactions matter to the audience because they matter to the people in the movie.

Scott has threatened Apple+ audiences with a three-and-a-half-hour cut of the movie. I have seen some reviewers hold out hope that the additional hour will make the movie into something worth watching. I can't think of a single thing in the movie that I want to see a single minute more of, nor will this potential 210-minute or so masterpiece change the fact that the movie I watched in the theater is trash.