Ouf | Online Only | n+1 | Marion Leclair and Edward Lee-Six
Ridley Scott’s new film confronts viewers with an unfamiliar paradox: it is both wildly unreliable and resolutely demystifying, simultaneously implausible and deliberately underwhelming. The costumes are exquisite, the sets magnificent, the cavalry charges thunderous. The execution of Marie-Antoinette (Catherine Walker) is spectacular. It is also set in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with Napoleon in the audience, which he wasn’t.