By Christos Zabounis

Memories… of Waterloo were awakened by veteran director Sir Ridley Scott’s new film on the life of Napoleon. The winner of the Oscar for Best Picture for “The Gladiator”, returns with an epic production where lovers of the genre will have their fill of battles. Why “Waterloo”? Because the historians who dealt with the life of the French emperor recovered after the pile of inaccuracies. Those who were most disturbed, of course, were his compatriots, Macron’s current subjects, who characterized the project as “British”, in other words, hostile. How else to explain the presentation of the greatest soldier of the modern era as an inept leader, the henchman of his wife Josephine? Or even the barbaric scene of the bombing of the Pyramids of Egypt, which never took place? But the goals of History are different and those of the show are different. “I don’t care if he hit the Pyramids with his cannons, and if he didn’t it was a quick way to show what he did in Egypt,” the 87-year-old British director-producer responded to the criticism in an interview with The Times of London. To add prophetically: “I don’t need historians to make films.” If we want to distance ourselves from the Anglo-French controversy, the blockbuster “Napoleon” has cinematic qualities that will attract the audience. Already in the USA climbed to No. 2 at the box office, while queues formed outside theaters in both the UK and France. In the land of the flamboyant orange, Corsican, rumored to be of Greek descent from his mother, sold 42,992 tickets in over 150 theaters in its first week of release.