Napoleon

If you’ve seen Gladiator, you know Ridley Scott excels at cinematically capturing an epic historical setting. For his next film he is portraying the French Revolution through the eyes of Napoleon (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Emperor Napoleon was a feverish nation-builder and psychologically insecure man who loved fighting the Brits, so fittingly part of this trailer is cut to a cover of a classic Radiohead banger, “The National Anthem,” from their 2000 album Kid A.

The official trailer opens with a five-second micro-teaser, accompanied by an accented stream of snare notes and crunchy distorted chords as we see shots of Napoleon attending to three different grand battles, before placing a crown on his head: thus it presents a mini-synopsis of the trailer to the film. The trailer’s storyline proceeds to cut back and forth between the exercise of power and the people. French citizens are being executed at the guillotine and facing cannonfire in the streets of Paris, while Napoleon is handed increasing military authority. The music—potentially library tracks--amps up when we see the streets, but cuts to near-silence each time we return to the backrooms of power. An ascending minor scale motif builds, but is cut off prematurely at 0:33, with the faint ghost of the note we were heading for echoing off into obscurity, a musical trope that trailers for the MCU expertly exploited. The syncing of action and percussion hits with interwoven dialogue is de rigueur for the type of sequences portrayed up to the Radiohead entry.

The Radiohead cover enters at 0:42. The words “Everyone, everyone around here,” are timed with centered block text—broken or smudged in the manner of Joker’s title card—listing Ridley Scott’s directorial greatest hits (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, etc), as Napoleon walks down a lavish staircase surrounded by party guests. This cover features subdued and melancholic vocals from the artist Kinnship, with music production by Riaya and Mark Evans. The song communicates isolation and fear, which runs counter to the trailer’s images of warfare and glory.

At 1:23, as we see the scene of what I expect to be Napoleon’s 1799 coup, with Napoleon standing in the middle of the French palace, surrounded by French soldiers with rifles at the ready; there we hear the lyric “Everyone is holding on.” As the Radiohead fans in the room all know, the words “is holding on” are essentially used as a refrain in “The National Anthem”—so if you’re editing a cover of this song into a trailer, you want to place this line strategically. Here everyone around Napoleon is holding on to their weapons, everyone is holding on for the potential order to fire, and Napoleon continues to hold on to power in spite of his insecurities.

Staccato rhythmic lines from the strings take a prominent role next to the percussion in the next part of the trailer, from 1:34, as the vocals begin to improvise, departing from the original Radiohead lyrics. This build in intensity sets us up for the obligatory trailer classic of a string of six slow triplets at 2:06 followed by a cut to silence. The absence of music here grabs our attention for this trailer’s showstopper, an Alexander Nevsky-inspired ice battle. Deep snare accents sync here with the firing and impact of cannonballs, leading to another effective cut to silence at 2:22 synched to an underwater shot of bodies and blood sinking beneath the ice.

To close out the trailer, for the Radiohead fans out there—go on, raise your hands—at 2:26 we are treated to a simplified crunchy synth rendering of the bass riff from “The National Anthem,” notable because the bass riff is arguably the central element of the first 90 seconds of the original song.

Napoleon is in theatres November 22.

— Jack Hui Litster