Waterloo (1970)

People are voting emotionally.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

WATERLOO is a near-definitive staging of the famous 1815 battle, made as a co-production between Italy, America, and Russia. Dino De Laurentis can certainly be proud of his work on this film, which is one of the finest visual stagings of a famous battle ever. It's quite amazing to sit back and watch a film which had the money to cast thousands of much-needed extras to give the film a real authentic feel. If they made it today you just know it would all be CGI, whereas in WATERLOO it's real.I imagine few viewers could resist being stirred by the scenes of British cavalry charges and cannon fire against overwhelming French numbers. The aim seems to be to recreate the famous 19th century paintings commemorating the battle, and certainly this film is a visual masterpiece with glorious scenery, costumes, and special effects. Every penny of the budget is put on the screen to glorious effect.Running at two hours, the first hour of this is the set-up, bringing the main players on both sides to life. Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer are well cast in fire and ice roles, Steiger hamming it up delightfully as the all-heart Napoleon and Plummer bringing a cold sneer to the part of Wellington. The supporting cast includes old reliables like Ian Ogilvy, Terence Alexander, and Jack Hawkins, also making use of Virginia McKenna's icy beauty and Orson Welles's larger-than-life persona. Dan O'Herlihy also makes a convincing Marshal Ney. Overall, WATERLOO is a treat for the historical fan among us, offering great old-fashioned spectacle of the like you just don't get these days.

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.

One has to admit that director Sergey Bondarchuk has very impressively marshalled the resources necessary, and then planned and used them in recreating the battle of Waterloo - the epic scale of the battle is all over the screen.Unfortunately, the film doesn't convey the progress of the battle with coherence in the way that, say, Zulu does. And the battle is edited together from some shots which are beautifully captured in the camera and some which are plainly shambolic.And once one moves away from the battle, things go further downhill. The dubbing for many of the non-English speaking cast is very noticeable, much of the acting is not very good, and Rod Steiger's mannered histrionics as Napoleon are simply awful.I thought this film was not very good at all.