movie

Directors of historical feature films face a difficult task. How can they make the characters familiar to an audience without reducing them to caricatures? How can they make sure that knowledge of the outcome – battles won or lost, empires built then ruined – doesn’t make the story seem like it’s writing itself? Director Ridley Scott is not a historian and presumably wants to entertain rather than to enlighten. But the problem of historical truth is an interesting one. It is not easy to know the “real” Napoleon. There’s a recognizable version of him – the confident general beloved of his troops, the instinctive military tactician who could run on empty for days at a time, his stern and somewhat