I'm sorry, but they totally screwed this one up.
A poor adaption, for my money.
Ridley Scott's decision to encourage the actors to speak in their natural/normal accents makes any attempt to suspend one's disbelief utterly impossible.
Joaquin sounds like a surfer, the French aristocrats sound British (because the actors are), and the nearest to actually being French (French-Finnish actor Edouard Philipponnat, educated in Sweden and Switzerland) plays Russia's Tsar Alexander!
How weird is that?
Between choices like those, unnecessarily hedonistic plot points, and editing that jumps here, there, and everywhere (by covering several huge battles and the better part of a decade in a matter of scenes lasting only seconds), it is an altogether underwhelming film experience.
Napoleon Bonaparte made an incalculable impact on human civilization, but the takeaway here is that he was randy and good with ordnance and munitions.
