Tomniboos

This miniseries devotes more time than the David Lynch version (but at 4.5 hrs will be less than the two new Denis Villeneuve films). The big success here is that it manages to unpack much more of Frank Herbert's novel, expand the role of characters who were either truncated or missing from the Lynch film. It also gains more depth by including a few more scenes as well e.g. The banquet scene, the interactions with Duncan and Keynes after the death of Duke Leto.

There is one particularly large change from the novel and this is to expand the role of the Princess Irulan who now takes on an investigation role and is used as a way of helping the audience understand the story. This makes perfect sense given that viewers of the Lynch version were largely left baffled.

Where it lets itself down is in production values. Acting is variable in quality and at times below professional levels, some actors seem to be struggling to act in English and are emphasising parts of sentences in all the wrong places. Even oscar winner William Hurt seems dead behind the eyes on this just quietly reading out his lines with little passion. PH Moriarti is often incomprehensible Only Ian Mcneice really shines delivering a pantomime like performance and occasionally breaking the fourth wall.

VFX is generally acceptable though also reused a bit in places. Some really obvious backdrops lets this down badly though in places - not sure why they didn't use green-screen but you can clearly see where paintings have been stuck together in places.

The costume design is another dodgy part of this. It feels like the designers thought making a sci-fi film was a license to treat everything like an avant garde Paris fashion show. Some very silly costumes and ridiculous hats make it hard to take some scenes seriously.

It is amazing that Ridley Scott still seems able to make epics on this scale. This film was never likely to be successful and there is a good reason why film makers such as Kubrick have failed to make a suitable biopic of Napoleon.

Main issue here is the film tries to squeeze to much history into too little time. This necessitates some major narrative gaps and omissions in the history of the Napoleonic period (no mention of Trafalgar, the Invasion of Spain, Battle of Jena, Battle of Lepizig). At one point Napoleon just seems to return from his failed invasion Russia and is told he most go into exile in Elba. It reality that decision came on the back of military defeats in large pitched battles.

That said, much of the actual history that is shown appears to be fairly accurate. There are a few bits of artistic license Napoleon meeting Wellington etc but this is a historical film not a documentary.

It strengths are probably the battle sequences and visual aspects. Scott is still great at making these sort of scenes and they are incredibly effective. Vanessa Kirby is also excellent as Josephine and probably delivers the films best performance.

This film doesn't do many favours for Joaquin Phoenix. Despite seeming like a sound casting choice, he looks uncomfortable in this role and never really brought Napoleon to life.

All in all though still worth watching. Historical epics like this are rare, it is visually stunning and although flawed people should watch these sort of movies otherwise they'll just keep making more superhero trash instead.