Our Pop Culture Contrarian podcast team will soon be reviewing Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” but for now, we have the aptly written historical commentary of Mike Coté.

There is no single historical character between the American Revolution and World War II about whom more words have been spilled than Napoleon Bonaparte.

The two-time emperor of the French, genius military commander, and cultural juggernaut has been a figure of fascination, scorn, or respect — depending on your political views. He was a paradox in many ways: conservative yet reformist, protectionist yet expansionist, and strategically patient yet temperamentally mercurial. He was a brilliant leader of men, especially on the battlefield, but could be quite demure in private. He ended the French Revolution, began to restore the church, reinvented the nobility, and, unfortunately, brought slavery back to the French Empire. At the same time, he cemented many of the progressive policies of the Revolution — retaining the emancipation of the Jews, codifying a neutral rule of law, centralizing and growing the state, and retaining national institutions like the levée en masse and the tricolor. He was a man of contradictions.

Ridley Scott’s newest historical film, “Napoleon,” is just as paradoxical as the Great Man himself. It is stunningly beautiful, rich in sound and score, and contains some of the best battle scenes in recent memory. But it also includes some of the worst dialogue in years, makes a hash of history, and dashes so rapidly through time and space that it gives viewers whiplash.

The film is not a biopic of Napoleon, nor is it a film about the Napoleonic Wars or the French Revolution. Instead, it is an intense character study of a toxic marriage between Bonaparte and his first wife, Josephine. This could be interesting, but the importance of this relationship is wildly exaggerated, and the details are pure invention. The most unforgivable failure of Scott’s epic, however, is its complete warping of Napoleon himself.

Obviously, Coté concedes, “two and a half hours … is not nearly enough time to tell the whole story of one of history’s most complex figures.” But some of the choices were perplexing.

Instead of focusing on Napoleon earning the love of France, expostulating his motivations, or adding in more battles like Marengo and Leipzig, he chooses to spend over half the movie on dull, nonfactual romantic drama. None of Napoleon’s myriad accomplishments off the battlefield are mentioned, which is a shame given his paramount influence on European governance and law. His leadership in government was transformative, he fundamentally reshaped the map of Europe — arguably creating the German and Italian unification movements — and he rescued France from this mismanagement of the Revolutionaries. This is all ignored in favor of awkward romantic scenes. That’s a bad trade.

Too much detail in the battles is not historically accurate, and too little time is spent developing key political characters at a pivotal time in European history.

The most painful aspect of “Napoleon” is the ridiculous portrayal of the man himself. Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte like a 19th-century Joker, complete with the same ineptitude toward women and bipolar behavior. To Scott, Napoleon was a sleepy autistic incel who was dominated by his wife. When he wasn’t a submissive mouse, he was engaged in fits of impotent rage.

None of this is remotely related to the contemporary descriptions of the French Emperor. On the first contention, Napoleon was famous for his ability to work well on almost no sleep. This is mentioned in nearly every contemporaneous account; to depict him as the opposite is a dereliction of duty. Napoleon’s personality was in some ways hot-headed and thin-skinned, but he was far more measured, domineering, and strategic than the film allows.

Coté celebrates several conservative themes, however, such as “strong preference for order over chaos,” “an undercurrent of chivalry, where gallantry and courage in the face of death are honorable,” and “the elevation of the national over the personal.” Most of all, “In the progressive world of Hollywood, treating the Jacobins as terrorists is about as conservative as it gets.”

He concludes:

Still, it is sadly not enough to redeem what could have been a glorious film about an epochal man’s rise and fall. Ridley Scott tries to tell an interesting story about Napoleon but falls flat in both respects. The story is bland and spastic, with seemingly random jumps between unrelated scenes that confuse more than clarify. The movie treats its central figure with scorn, making it an uncomfortable experience for the average viewer and a positively infuriating one for the historically inclined. The battles are enjoyable but are not worth the price of admission. You’d be far better off waiting for it to come to streaming or skipping it altogether.

The Great Man deserved more than this falsification of his fascinating life. The audience does, too.

Read the whole thing here.