Highly Overrated But Still Good

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Waterloo looks good with marvellous costumes and art direction. It looks epic with a cast of thousand at the battlefield. It just does not hang together well with a script that comes across as second rate.The film starts with Napoleon in exile on the island of Elba when he returns to France and gains control with the French army remaining loyal to him. Napoleon then leads his troops to the battle of Waterloo where he is on the edge of victory against the Duke of Wellington until Prussian troops arrive to help the British army defeat him.Director Sergey Bondarchuk has set out to make an epic but is really let down by the screenplay, maybe because his command of English let him down.Rod Steiger gives an interesting interpretation of Napoleon. Despite his lapses into hysterical method acting, I always found him to be a worthwhile character actor. Christopher Plummer's Napoleon was a bit one note, he really does come across as a series of quotes.

I thought this was a good movie, and could have been a great movie.The bulk of the plot of the movie didn't do much for me. I wouldn't necessarily criticize it, I don't think it was bad, it just didn't interest me enough to get my attention.The actual battle of Waterloo though was stunning. This occupied, I don't know how much, a little less than half of the movie, I think 40% or so. But it was incredible. I've spent years playing table-top wargames so I feel like I know how battles work. The battle was really brought to life and all of the details were very clear and vivid. The glory and the horror of battle were brought to life, more than any other battle scene I can think of off hand. There is one moment as an example (I'm going to be a little vague so this doesn't turn into a spoiler) where cavalry charges infantry which is unexpectedly formed into squares. This would be a bad position for cavalry of this era, which you know if you've studied Napoleonic warfare, but the problematic nature of it was immediately clear visually as you watched. I loved this.But to me, the movie is ruined, or kept from greatness anyway, by Steiger. He's a great actor, but he didn't feel like Napoleon to me at all. Napoleon was an intensely charismatic man. Steiger is a -tough- man, an imposing man, but I wouldn't call him charismatic at all. And he feels very American to me.In the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, there is a comic caricature of Napoleon. This version is flamboyant, aware of his own grandeur, believing in his own grandeur (rather like Beethoven). Although the character is comical, I think it is probably much closer to the reality of Napoleon. Closer to my image of him anyway. Ironically Napoleon's body double in that movie, who is intentionally meant to be the opposite of the real Napoleon (crude, lacking style, with a bit of a New Jersey accent), reminded me more of Steiger than Steiger did of Napoleon.Maybe it's my image of Napoleon which is flawed, but I think considering what he did on sheer force of personality, that Napoleon would have felt like a very flamboyant person in person.

The film is a bit of a high concept mess. You have to imagine the production team trying to figure out how to restage a "heroic" football game that went down in sports' legacy, because that's kind of what the battle of Waterloo is in military annals. The truth is that team competitions, including old style military field tactics, don't have much of a story to them. The action is the drama, not the individual soldiers themselves. As a young man I saw a re-edited version on TV, and like now, even after seeing a two hour version, I'm still at a loss as to the story.The acting is okay, if a bit overstated here and there. I actually worked with Rod Steiger many years ago, and he always struck me as exceptionally professional and a very caring individual. Having said that, I think he may have been misidrected as what he did here was to give the audience the power hungry "has-been" out to make a bid for a second chance at European dominance. It works after a fashion, but I think the performance gets overused. Napoleon, from all renditions I've seen of him, had his passions (and moments of rage), but he was also a strategist and tactician. Here Steiger shows us a Napoleon who is not so much a master tactician, but a kind of prodigal brat who shows us fury when pieces of his plan fail to fall into place. Steiger shows us a pensive man prone to fits. In this his acting really is unsurpassed, and he would reprise this character in Qadaffi's "Lion of the Desert".As for other performances, they all mostly hit their cues, but are hampered by an edit that is less than sterling. Plummer does an outstanding job of showing us a reserved Wellington, even if his expression does betray a somewhat impish actor trying to refrain from letting us in on how he gets into character. Others, including the actor who plays the Prince of Orange, do well, but sometimes let their inner Brit hold back a more vetted and thorough performance. Ergo there is a reserve in the thesping that works well, but also underscores the fact that we are watching a cast not of the nations contending for power in that period.Nearly every shot in act two is a battle sequence. The amount of artistry that went into staging the battle is superb, but ultimately what we get is a huge battle that is over acted, and not much drama, in spite of the interpersonal moments scattered here and there throughout the second act. It's pretty stunning to see the cavalry charges and Wellington's infantry forming square, but we're not privy to the actual maneuvers of the regiments on the field, nor why they were done. But, maybe the film makers are paying homage to the old notion that no battle plan lasts beyond initial contact with the enemy. Then again, maybe the lost third of the film would explain all those details.All in all the Hong Kong DVD edit that I have is a bit of an edited mess. You attach that to the fact that it is a Dino "b-grade-producer" De Laurentis flick, and you get something that looks like a high budgeted b-grade epic. My biggest critiques are as follows; Orson Wells as the King of France was a severe misstep. The camera work ranges from brilliant to poor. We gets zooms and pans in a number of shots. The exact kind of thing you want to avoid in films like this, and the film, as hampered as it is to begin with, suffers more for it, leaving a mess of a film that should have been one of the great epics shot at the time. My final critique is actually a bit of praise, and that is at least the producers actually got the size of the armies right, and could only do so by employing the only inexpensive Caucasian army around; the Soviet Union. That was a stroke of production genius, and we have the Kremlin to thank for getting the grandeur of the battle correct.Not a film I would readily recommend, but see it once if you're into historical epics. Missing footage equals missing story, which equals a film that could have been more, but ultimately falls flat as a total cinematic experience.

Perhaps the fact that I've a keen interest in history and not long ago read a biography of Wellington, drew me to nonetheless watch this big budget flop from the early 70's. Certainly in terms of scale it's a monumental achievement with the director's deployment of the huge numbers of combatants adding to the appreciation of the great generals themselves. With no computerised special effects in sight to artificially swell the numbers, the tableaux of blue versus red (and black) literally pops the eye and boggles the mind. While the bloodiness and brutality of the close combat scenes are not surprisingly toned down in deference to the censor, the cutaway final scene, where Wellington navigates his horse through the vast numbers of the dead, on a blood-soaked battlefield, tellingly conveys in complete silence the truth of Wellington's own words, quoted in the film, that there is only one thing more terrible than a battle lost and that is a battle won. The build up to the climactic battle is not unnaturally less engrossing, being a mixture of the French politics of the day, English societal mores and battle strategy, with a sprinkling of army humour to humanise and perhaps leaven somewhat the seriousness of everything else around it. The acting by the leads is variable, Rod Steiger, almost inevitably gives us The Method a- la-mode while Christopher Plummer somehow fails to convey the stature of Wellington while Orson Welles briefly bloats into view as the exiled French King Louie XXVII. This of course was the age of the anti-war movement which might explain the over-the-top (no pun intended) scene of a young English soldier screaming "Why are we killing each other" as he goes battle crazy as the film makes it point quite pointedly enough without the histrionics.