Watch Waterloo For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Napoleon (Steiger) escapes from exile in Elba, returns to France, defeats some enemies, and is himself defeated once and for all by Wellington (Plummer) at Waterloo in Belgium.I have no idea how closely this movie follows the historical event, never having been a Napoleon freak, but Rod Steiger is certainly different from David's heroic portrait, pointing the way to victory atop that fiery horse. (Cf., the ads for Napoleon brandy.) Napoleon's early victory's were behind him. He was fifteen years older now and had a bad case of the trots.Steiger makes him extremely gloomy, like that character in the Peanuts comic strips that walks around under a little cloud. What suffering. Steiger gives Napoleon two modes of speaking -- an ear-shattering shout or a hoarse hiss.His opposite number, the Duke of Wellington, who massacres the French troops with the aid of the Prussians, is played by Plummer as aristocratic, cool, and ironic. Wellington won more than the battle. He won more memorials than Napoleon. Wellington not only had a tasty dish of pastry-wrapped roast beef named after him, but a boot as well. What did Napoleon get? A high-calorie pastry. Well, come to think of it, there's that brandy, so maybe the battle was Wellington's but the memorials are a tie.The first hour of the movie shows us the character and circumstances of the two leaders. The handsome Wellington dances around in a palace, resplendent in crimson frock, making wisecracks, while Napoleon broods in drab gray, in pain, alone, carrying on with himself in an interior monologue. There is a brief appearance by a bloated Orson Welles as Louis XVIII. It's the high spot of the film because Welles treats the role as a joke. Otherwise humor is totally lacking.The second hour is -- well, you have never seen so many extras, whether or not half of them may have been mannequins, and no CGIs either. The battle is a confusing and muddy mess. BANG. BOOM. It goes on and on, obscured by smoke and a sudden storm. There are dead bodies in red and blue all over the vast landscape. It's impossible to follow the details of the engagement but easy enough to grasp the overall picture.Sergei Bondarchuk is quick to use crane and helicopter shots to capture all the money that was spent on the production. It must have cost as much as the original battle itself. But some of the shots are bizarre. An aide whispers something in Steiger's ear and there is a cut to an enormous close up of one -- just one -- of Steiger's eyeballs. The overall impression is that the direction was done by an amateur with an awful big budget.I'm recommending it though. Too many college students don't know who Napoleon was. If they've heard the name at all, it's been in the expression "Napoleonic complex." So I advise all high school kids to watch it. Look at the funny hats they wore.

I first saw Waterloo as a child, while staying in a hotel on vacation. Even at that young age, I found the movie fascinating, with electrifying performances and hypnotic battle scenes. I did have a lot of trouble understanding the strategy, which isn't very well conveyed to the neophyte. One thing I did notice was that it seemed to take forever.I later bought the film on VHS and enjoyed it far more, having studied more history and having been given a better illustration of the battle and its components via Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series of novels. What stands out even more now are the tremendous performances of Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer, especially Steiger. Steiger grabs your attention and holds it there and even makes you secretly hope he can pull things out, given that he presents such an inspiring presence. Plummer isn't quite as electrifying, but he does command his space, but his egotistical and decidedly elitist air doesn't exactly endear Wellington as a hero. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the characters are fairly one note, with the odd moment here or there (like Ponsonby's story of his father and his snuff). Orson Welles does convey the corruption of the Bourbons and you aren't sad to see him conclude his cameo. However, the film succeeds in making characters out of the armies themselves, and the soldiers in the thick of things. You can see the fear and determination etched on their faces and you can see the cost of the battle in the bodies strewn about. For all of the shots of glory, there are plenty of horror.In the end, the film is less about characters as it is about two opposing forces; and, in that, it succeeds tremendously. It certainly helps to have a primer of the battle's history on hand to follow the sequence of events and their importance, but it is not strictly necessary. You do need to settle in, as it is a long ride, though with a lot of interesting sights along the way.

On June 18, 1815, all the promise of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were snuffed out in a single day. Since then, we in the West have been ruled almost always by cynical oligarchs focused on greed and the privileges of the elite. We have played recklessly with nationalism,experimented cruelly with arid socialism, and cynically dabbled in democracy. We have come close to self destruction, and may yet accomplish that deed. Sadly, that could all have been avoided except for the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon's stomach cramps.Despite two centuries of (non-French) propaganda about his power-corrupted self-centeredness, Napoleon was a true visionary revolutionary with an extremely advanced notion of European political, social and economic relationships. Had his dream of a single Western polity come into being after 1815, the world would have suffered much, much less from fraternal and genocidal conflicts in the past century. The conventional wisdom of the victors -- that Waterloo was the last scene of a heroic struggle of freedom loving peoples to defeat French tyranny -- tries to conceal the fact that all the victors actually did was reimpose the tyranny of the ancien regime.So...thank you, England, and William Pitt, Jr. Thank you Prussia, Stein, Hardenberg and Queen Louise. Thank you Austria, Kaiser Franz (the father in law of Napoleon) and Metternich. And thank you Russia and Alexander. Through your work in destroying Napoleon and the promise of the Enlightenment we have gotten to enjoy:Two World Wars; Vicious natonalism on both left and right; Hitler and StalinThe British officers in this movie are so ridiculous -- all of them are gorgeous and perfectly groomed aristocrats with not a hair out of place, not an ugly, inbred throwback in evidence -- though of course there were plenty of those. Plummer's portrayal of Wellington is a decent recreation of England's greatest commander. The music at the Countess of Richmond's ball, a beautifully shot sequence, is all wrong -- Vienna 1890, not Brussels 1815. But it's a lovely extended scene.The Prussians are exactly what you would expect with a Russian director -- mindless proto-Nazis.The French, of course, are very brave, and very foolish. They die noisily, but magnificently.Rod Steiger is not the actor one would want to play Napoleon, despite superficial resemblances from several angles. Yes, Napoleon got a bit chubby in later years, but not double-chinned. And where is the handsomeness, the charisma, the EYES that flashed and commanded? Not here. Steiger blusters and shouts instead. And the script's depiction of Napoleon's supposedly tortured inner thoughts is dubious at best.The Battle of Waterloo, which takes up the last third of the movie, is utterly stupendous, even better than director Bondarchuk's Battle of Borodino in his Russian epic, War and Peace (1968). Nowadays, this would have been done using CGI, and wouldn't have been half as thrilling.

I saw this movie on its release in 1970 and was hugely impressed by all aspects of how it recreated the battle of Waterloo and how close it stuck to the original facts , its use of the original statements of Napoleon and Wellington and of course the thrilling cavalry charges which illustrated the shock and awe that someone facing such a charge must have felt .A few years later I spent a week on the site of the battlefield staying in a hotel just behind Wellington's tree from where he conducted most of the battle . During this time I walked every area of the battle , visited Hugomont and saw the evocative graves of the handful of french soldiers who managed to get over the walls and who were buried where they fell . The battle field has been preserved intact and one is struck by the closeness and intimacy of the conflict where Napoleon and Wellington stood on opposite ridges and were visible to each other at all times during the battle .As I am from Ireland I found it interesting to discover that the horses of Napoleon ( called Marengo ) and Wellington ( Copenhagen ) at Waterloo were bred in Co. Wexford at a place called Wellington Bridge and that in fact the two horses were half brothers ! I watched the DVD for the first time in 40 years last night and was struck by two things , how close the movie was to the actual topography of the real Waterloo , La Haye Sainte etc. and how miscast Christopher Plummer was .I admire Plummer and have followed his career but now in hindsight I feel he was too young for the part of Wellington particularly against such a strong force that was Rod Steiger's Napoleon . Plummer came across as effete and campy and his main forte seemed to be confined to delivering the witty quips and put downs used by Wellington which in no way did justice to the real Wellington whereas in contrast Steiger nailed the role of Napoleon .In fact I feel that Plummer could now play Wellington and do him justice much better at his present age ! I also feel that the over dramatic use of the display of arrayed cannon when the Old Guard was invited to surrender was unnecessary and completely over the top as the moment itself was both pitiful and glorious enough without embellishment . The simple French monument on the field of Waterloo today to the Old Guard is by far the most simple and moving of all the battle field's many monuments .Those criticisms aside I enjoyed the movie and would watch it again , it has aged well and if you want to know about ancient battles then this is the best battle movie of all time .