Napoleon is Barbie for men. Ridley Scott’s latest epic is perhaps the most anticipated movie since Greta Gerwig’s hit came out last summer. And just as Barbie dance parties spoke to the inner child of women who grew up playing with the Mattel mannequin, the Battle of Austerlitz caters to any man who collected toy soldiers as a child. Navy blue is the hot pink of the Napoleonic Wars.
We live in self-serious times, however. Barbie was entertainingly campy and silly, yet the film hitched itself to a thin veneer of girl-power feminism. Napoleon, which opens on November 22, fetishizes battlefield glory and carnage—the cavalry charges are a lot more seductive than the couplings of Napoleon and Josephine—but tacks on a perfunctory anti-war message, somberly listing the death tolls of the French emperor’s bloodlust.
