A NINETEENTH CENTURY SOAP OPERA.

I was not happy with Ridley Scott's recent Napoleon.

Yes, and it is in the blood of contemporary writers and directors to turn every story into Dynasty, or perhaps Keeping Up with the Kardashians with hand-sewn costumes.  It's. A. Contemporary. Movie.  If it leaves people with the impression that Josephine's menopause was the proximate cause of a decade of misery east of the Rhine, so be it.  Anything can happen in a cartoon, or a soap opera, even one set up as a blockbuster movie about a Corsican corporal.

That's where The Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neil wound up.

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring.

Look no further than the cover of Beethoven's Eroica to see that tension between apotheosis and betrayal.

Unfortunately, a popular movie isn't the place for bringing the Tragic Vision into alternative histories, and it can fail as an attempt at a soap opera.

Had Napoleon never existed, the Napoleonic Wars would certainly have happened in some fashion. The French Revolution was never going to end with just France, and even when the coalitions against Napoleon ultimately prevailed, mini French Revolutions took place across Europe in and before 1848.

Yet the Napoleon movie is not some grand contemplation on the evils of Bonaparte. This list of deaths is merely an embarrassing attempt to salvage some meaning from the film’s flotsam and jetsam. The real heart of the story is Napoleon’s non-romance with Josephine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), an aristocrat who barely survived the Reign of Terror with her head.

Rather than giving audiences the historical-political war movie we expected, Scott decided to give us a romantic tragedy without the romance. The plus-side of a magnet has more chemistry with another plus-side than Phoenix’s Napoleon has with Kirby’s Josephine. In fact, Josephine immediately cheats on Napoleon on screen, and Napoleon has numerous affairs off screen, despite his loud declarations of love for Josephine. The film squanders its time with unromantic sex scenes to illustrate that the marriage was not loveless, and repeatedly brings up Josephine’s inability to conceive a son, for which Napoleon ultimately divorces her.

Even this plot line, which swallows nearly a third of the runtime, perhaps might be salvageable if the movie used it to make a point about the unfairness of royal customs or the love that perseveres through such obstacles. Yet the movie acts more like a documentary, attempting to portray a gritty version of what likely happened, rather than a pointed critique or celebration of something. It suggests that Josephine and Napoleon deeply care for one another, but between the lack of chemistry and the painfully awkward portrayals of their “romance,” the entire story falls flat.

Worse, the film strains to reinterpret key moments in Napoleon’s life as attempts to return to Josephine, as if his rise to power and his return from exile were moments in a love story rather than ambitious moves to influence France and Europe. Yet, the film lacks the discipline to make even this odd modern suggestion its central theme. The non-romance instead acts like an alien parasite, sucking the life out of the film.

Those history books I referred to, or perhaps War and Peace, will tell you more about Napoleon than that movie.  Your favorite recording of Eroica providing background music optional.