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A review by bigedbarnham
Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made by Alison Castle
5.0
I'm struck by how much I love this facsimile of the original TASCHEN publication, and I'm very thankful that folks took the time and energy to dig through the archives to source and assemble everything.
I'm in awe of the treatment, the transcripts of taped conversations, the photo file of 2600 images (of 17,000 that exist), the cross-referenced catalog, the production breakdowns, all of it except...
...the amazingly dull script.
It feels like a chronological, paint-by-numbers story where Kubrick can't quite make up his mind what story he wants to tell, so he tries to tell all of it. Voice-overs from a narrator and four different key characters give it an explanatory feel. Everything's being explained - either "here's why this scenario played out the way it did" or "here's what's at stake as Napoleon or Josephine consider their choices." Even the straight narrative scenes have this professorial, explanatory feel of "this is why this is important."
The few good scenes that get beyond this (almost) are between Tsar Alexander and Kutusov. They actually come across as the only two real people in the script. The fact that they're more interesting in what would be their 5-10 minutes of screen time than any of Napoleon's screen time is pretty telling.
Now, two things...
1. This was not necessarily the final draft that would have driven the film had the project moved forward.
2. The visually epic scale of Napoleonic battles and scenes (hell, the whole era) is hard to communicate in a script.
Those things said, this draft probably shows the direction the production was headed, and Kubrick didn't describe much of anything beyond vague references to scale and design. This really spells trouble for any studio exec reading the script, and looking at the budget. They were likely left with the question, "Where's the movie?"
I'm thinking Barry Lyndon is what came out of Kubrick's work on Napoleon, and I think that's a great outcome. Barry Lyndon rocks.
Note: My 5 star rating is for the TASCHEN facsimile as a whole, not the script (with I would feel generous giving 2 stars).
I'm in awe of the treatment, the transcripts of taped conversations, the photo file of 2600 images (of 17,000 that exist), the cross-referenced catalog, the production breakdowns, all of it except...
...the amazingly dull script.
It feels like a chronological, paint-by-numbers story where Kubrick can't quite make up his mind what story he wants to tell, so he tries to tell all of it. Voice-overs from a narrator and four different key characters give it an explanatory feel. Everything's being explained - either "here's why this scenario played out the way it did" or "here's what's at stake as Napoleon or Josephine consider their choices." Even the straight narrative scenes have this professorial, explanatory feel of "this is why this is important."
The few good scenes that get beyond this (almost) are between Tsar Alexander and Kutusov. They actually come across as the only two real people in the script. The fact that they're more interesting in what would be their 5-10 minutes of screen time than any of Napoleon's screen time is pretty telling.
Now, two things...
1. This was not necessarily the final draft that would have driven the film had the project moved forward.
2. The visually epic scale of Napoleonic battles and scenes (hell, the whole era) is hard to communicate in a script.
Those things said, this draft probably shows the direction the production was headed, and Kubrick didn't describe much of anything beyond vague references to scale and design. This really spells trouble for any studio exec reading the script, and looking at the budget. They were likely left with the question, "Where's the movie?"
I'm thinking Barry Lyndon is what came out of Kubrick's work on Napoleon, and I think that's a great outcome. Barry Lyndon rocks.
Note: My 5 star rating is for the TASCHEN facsimile as a whole, not the script (with I would feel generous giving 2 stars).