IndieWire reviewed a Ridley Scott film by fact-checking Wikipedia
The Original Review
“Scott's Napoleon feels less like a historical epic and more like a Wikipedia article someone tried to film.”
Ridley Scott is 86 years old. He has been making films for over half a century. He gave us Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator — movies that redefined what cinema could be. And David Ehrlich at IndieWire decided the most important thing to do with his Napoleon review was play history teacher. I know what it's like to read a review like this about your own work. You pour years of your life into something, you make thousands of creative decisions every single day on set, and someone with a laptop and a deadline reduces it all to a fact-checking exercise. Ehrlich doesn't review the film Ridley Scott made — he reviews the film he thinks a history documentary should have been.
What kills me is the total absence of any engagement with the craft on display. Scott orchestrated massive battle sequences, coaxed a genuinely unhinged performance out of Joaquin Phoenix, and built an entire emotional architecture around the Napoleon-Josephine relationship. These are the choices of a filmmaker who has been thinking about visual storytelling longer than most critics have been alive. But Ehrlich can't be bothered to discuss any of that because he's too busy cross-referencing dates with Wikipedia. That's not criticism — that's a homework assignment. Easy to say from the press box.
The thing that stings the most is knowing how many people on that crew — the cinematographers, the costume designers, the hundreds of extras who froze on location — will never get their work acknowledged because a critic decided historical nitpicking was more interesting than filmmaking analysis. IndieWire loves to position itself as the thinking person's film publication, but there's nothing thoughtful about ignoring the human labor behind art. You want to critique the film? Critique the film. But don't pretend you're doing something noble by grading a director's history homework while ignoring his actual craft.
I've seen young filmmakers read reviews like this and wonder why they bother. That's the real damage. Not a C grade — but the message that no amount of creative ambition matters if some critic decides your facts aren't straight. Ridley Scott will survive this review. But the next generation of directors reading IndieWire? They deserve better than this.
