Hope there’s a bit more to Napoleon than a re run of 1970 Bondarchuk “Waterloo” as all the battle scenes are taken from there.
Only one other film gets near to Waterloo in terms of its battle scenes. In fact it surpasses it. It is - of course - Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace'. I believe he had 300,000 extras (seconded from the Red Army) to stage the Battle of Borodino - which is a few more than actually fought it. But his direction - both his skill at the panoramic and his eye for small detail - will never be equalled. And not a frame of CGI in either film.
Napoleon is a great subject, possibly the greatest subject in history. But many filmmakers have been broken by the sheer scale of what they have to do. Abel Gance still comes closest but his 6 hour epic (or whatever it is) only gets to Napoleon graduating from military school. Stanley Kubrick spent a lifetime collecting a vast Napoleonic library and worked through 20 or 30 drafts of a film that was never made.
There are some cracking books though. 'Napoleon and his marshals' by AG Macdonell takes some beating for the sheer verve with which it's written. And the memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne who survived the Retreat of Moscow and the 1812 campaign are utterly extraordinary. Men eating each other to survive, others setting a church on fire, jammed with their fellow soldiers, in order to get some warmth......Talk about the horror.
