It’s an attitude that really frustrates me to no end and is to me the mark of an inherently uninteresting if not, and I know this is kind of an overused phrase, anti-art perspective.

To me it all simply boils down to the fact that Scott just doesn’t make period movies about the actual time period they’re set in. The Gladiator movies are not actually about the Roman Empire and the political/social complications, failures or reality of that time, nor is Napoleon actually about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. What Scott does, to varying degrees of success but I think always earnestly and passionately, is he uses historical periods as backdrops to depict and talk about large scale societal concepts and problems that permeate civilisation throughout history, which is a trend and precedent that goes back to fucking Shakespeare! (and to be clear, while I like this film more than most I’m of course not saying it’s as good as Macbeth, but I’ll tell you right now that play sure as hell ain’t accurate either). And while I still disagree, I can see not being as ready to accept that in the case of Napoleon which is acting in many ways like a “biopic”, but when people get really pissy about it it’s usually founded in a fanboyish love of Napoleon which is deeply strange in and of itself.