User reviews

Coming off War and Peace (1965-67), it seemed Sergei Bondarchuk was looking if lightning could strike twice with Waterloo (1970), almost looking like a sequel, minus the philosophy. This time promoting Napoleon from supporting character to protagonist, Waterloo chronicles the Hundred Days and the French Empire's final defeat.

I see Waterloo being called "the real thing"; the Soviet Army kindly took a break from destroying Czechoslovakia to pitch in with the battle scenes, just as they did with War and Peace (only they weren't devastating Czechoslovakia at that time). The result does make for some large battle scenes, but they're just an imitation of War and Peace. The rest of the film tends to drag, unfortunately, and tries to include too much: I didn't see the need to start with Napoleon's initial abdication, then see the whiplash from "France won't follow you" to promoting him to emperor again.

There's no doubt there's a lot of technical competence here, and outside the battle scenes too: the costumes and sets create that period flavour. It's a film set up well and deserved a better script.

There's not much here other than a battle sequence, but what a sequence it is! It's SUPER impressive, it's just that there's no "movie" around it. No explanation of characters or motivations so unless you know something about the battle itself you may be a little lost. But the battle is REALLY impressive!

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.

The director should be shot for casting Napoleon to look like himself. He's the most shlubby uncharismatic middle aged drunk. No charisma. The other actors avoid him as if he smells. Makes me think the Russians still have some unresolved feelings about old Napoleon...

That being said. The scenes of war are definitely very big. All the scenes with Christopher Plummer Are definitely the tonal inspiration for the Brits in Gore Verbinki's Pirate movies. Great light hearted stuff throughout, it's just the actor who plays Napoleon is AWFUL.

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.

On June 18, 1815, all the promise of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were snuffed out in a single day. Since then, we in the West have been ruled almost always by cynical oligarchs focused on greed and the privileges of the elite. We have played recklessly with nationalism,experimented cruelly with arid socialism, and cynically dabbled in democracy. We have come close to self destruction, and may yet accomplish that deed. Sadly, that could all have been avoided except for the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon's stomach cramps.

Despite two centuries of (non-French) propaganda about his power-corrupted self-centeredness, Napoleon was a true visionary revolutionary with an extremely advanced notion of European political, social and economic relationships. Had his dream of a single Western polity come into being after 1815, the world would have suffered much, much less from fraternal and genocidal conflicts in the past century. The conventional wisdom of the victors -- that Waterloo was the last scene of a heroic struggle of freedom loving peoples to defeat French tyranny -- tries to conceal the fact that all the victors actually did was reimpose the tyranny of the ancien regime.

So...thank you, England, and William Pitt, Jr. Thank you Prussia, Stein, Hardenberg and Queen Louise. Thank you Austria, Kaiser Franz (the father in law of Napoleon) and Metternich. And thank you Russia and Alexander. Through your work in destroying Napoleon and the promise of the Enlightenment we have gotten to enjoy:

Two World Wars; Vicious natonalism on both left and right; Hitler and Stalin

The British officers in this movie are so ridiculous -- all of them are gorgeous and perfectly groomed aristocrats with not a hair out of place, not an ugly, inbred throwback in evidence -- though of course there were plenty of those. Plummer's portrayal of Wellington is a decent recreation of England's greatest commander. The music at the Countess of Richmond's ball, a beautifully shot sequence, is all wrong -- Vienna 1890, not Brussels 1815. But it's a lovely extended scene.

The Prussians are exactly what you would expect with a Russian director -- mindless proto-Nazis.

The French, of course, are very brave, and very foolish. They die noisily, but magnificently.

Rod Steiger is not the actor one would want to play Napoleon, despite superficial resemblances from several angles. Yes, Napoleon got a bit chubby in later years, but not double-chinned. And where is the handsomeness, the charisma, the EYES that flashed and commanded? Not here. Steiger blusters and shouts instead. And the script's depiction of Napoleon's supposedly tortured inner thoughts is dubious at best.

The Battle of Waterloo, which takes up the last third of the movie, is utterly stupendous, even better than director Bondarchuk's Battle of Borodino in his Russian epic, War and Peace (1968). Nowadays, this would have been done using CGI, and wouldn't have been half as thrilling.

Waterloo (1971) -

"My My! At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender!" And that song by ABBA alongside the 'Sharpe' (1993-2008) TV series and Hornblower book series were the only references I had to these events until I watched this film.

Both of the latter were from the British perspective and the exact details didn't really stick in my head, especially as a large part of them were fictional.

But jokes aside, I didn't actually know much about this part of history at all, having not learned of it at school, so it was interesting to see the battles depicted in a more structured way in this film, which despite the terrible diction and generally poor sound quality, was uncomplicated in its delivery and well directed.

Sadly though, I had no subtitles and as such I barely understood anything that they said, which was a shame, because the editing otherwise was quite good.

As I always find with these war films, it only proved that there was such a waste of life and effort put in to that war. It angers me and makes me sad for all of those Mothers, Wives and Children left at home. I know that tyranny shouldn't be left unopposed, but I just can't abide war in any form. It also didn't help when I saw the General's lack of consideration for their troops, whom they only thought of as literal cannon fodder. Neither side seemed to have a care for their infantry at all.

A lot of the producers of this type of film, up until very recently, have tended to make the British infantry out to be simple idiots too. Not to mention the fact that the officers have always been depicted as pompous idiots too, an upgrade because of how fortunate they were to have been born in a bigger house with an estate and not in the slums, which automatically qualifies them to be in charge. Their has always been just a bit too much exaggeration in both of these cases and it particularly annoyed me in this film, especially as Napoleon (Rod Steiger) didn't even come across like that and he was essentially depicted as the villain of the piece. At least that's what I've been brought up to believe about him from the annuls of history.

And I can never understand how people can think it such a glorious and honourable thing to die in battle, which to me shows a lack of sense on everyone's part and actually says something about their breeding (Leave your Cousin alone!)

Aside from that, as far as I could see, the goal of this film, to show how the battle of Waterloo began and was won, was achieved and I would say that it was well done.

If my child suddenly took up an interest in warfare and wanted to know more about the origins of the song by ABBA I would happily show them this film as a teaching tool, because it seemed to get the point across.

Would I buy it on DVD to watch every weekend though? No. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't tune in to it again a few years down the line, when my imaginary child with odd interests has put me in a home and I've got nothing better to do. Because actually, it did what it said on the tin, which was all I could have asked for from an historical film.

619.81/1000.