Napoleon shoots up the pyramids in trailer for Ridley Scott’s movie

Martin Scorsese isn’t the only legendary, octogenarian movie director with an expensive, period-piece passion project bankrolled by Apple coming out this fall. Ridley Scott — who celebrated his 85th birthday in 2022, and has knocked out seven feature films in the last decade — will bring his life of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to theaters in November. Going by its first trailer, it’s got all the horse-based warfare, dodgy accents, and (checks notes) Radiohead trailercore you could want from a Ridley Scott historical epic.

There are two other things that it has in abundance. The first is Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix), history’s foremost short king, being negged Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine (“You are just a tiny little brute that is nothing without me”). It seems that he likes it. Napoleon blowing things up with his cannons. First, he bloodiously shoots an unruly crowd of people with his cannon. Then he blows up some warships — probably British ones, although the trailer doesn’t specify. Next, he destroys the Giza Pyramid. He then shoots a frozen lake that has an enemy army on it… But wait! Was Napoleon Shoot a Pyramid?

Scott and David Scarpa are taking a lot of liberties here. Scarpa has worked on several films with Scott. All the Money in the World and will re-team with him on next year’s Gladiator 2,Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, and engaged in a large battle with the Pyramids within his sight. My Googling did not turn up any records that show him shooting the cannons at them. Also, it’s reasonable to assume that in the course of the last 225 years, someone would have noticed that the top of one of pyramids had been blown off.

Image: Sony Pictures/Apple

Going by this charming demystification of Napoleon’s time in Egypt by historical novelist Shannon Selin, Scott and Scarpa are conflating the real Battle of the Pyramids with a myth that Napoleon’s troops shot off the Sphinx’s nose during target practice. According to Selin’s research, what actually happened when Napoleon visited this wonder of the world was less destructive, and almost adorably nerdy. Bonaparte had some members of his party climb the pyramid. The winner, a mathematician named Gaspard Montge, shared brandy with the other participants as they climbed the mountain. Napoleon then calculated the use of stones from pyramids for a wall 10 feet high around France. Monge was said to confirm this. But he’d had a bit of brandy by then.

That would have made a nice addition to the screen. But Scott knows a bombastic visual metaphor when he sees one, and with these scenes showing Napoleon graduating from using his phallic weapons to vaporize revolutionaries to using them to assault the embodiment of history itself, he’s certainly making his point.

It looks like it’s sick. NapoleonOn November 22, the film will be released in theaters.