A Grand Folly Worth Fighting For: Sergei Bondarchuk’s ‘Waterloo’

There was a time when war films aspired to something greater than the blood-spattered grit of today or tightly choreographed mayhem. They sought to understand history, to frame battles not merely as set pieces but as sweeping spectacles of human ambition, folly and fate. ‘Waterloo’ (1970), filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk’s titanic recreation of Napoleon’s last gamble, belongs to that rare breed of historically rigorous epics that delight the fastidious military history aficionado but are disdained by mainstream critics. Films of this kind - lavish, detail-obsessed, almost impossibly ambitious - are an extinct species today.

Take Roger Ebert, the oracle of popular film criticism. He awarded ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ (1970) a single miserable star out of four while ‘Waterloo’ and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1977) fared only slightly better, earning two apiece. Such films, devoted to painstaking historical accuracy, often meet with this fate: accused of being too dry, too technical, too obsessed with reenactment over character drama. Yet for those who recognize the artistry in war’s terrifying symmetry, ‘Waterloo’ is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Having conquered Tolstoy with War and Peace (1966-68), Bondarchuk was given the reins of Waterloo, armed with a production budget and logistical scale that seems almost inconceivable now. The battle sequences alone elevate ‘Waterloo’ beyond most war films.

His camera moves through the carnage in long, sweeping takes, as if an omniscient observer, gliding over ranks of men locking bayonets, zooming into cannon blasts, tilting up to capture the roiling smoke and the desperation in an officer’s eyes. The sheer visual poetry of cavalry charges, of a lone drummer boy amidst the chaos, of the Prussians’ arrival at the eleventh hour, is jaw-dropping.

This was an age before CGI, before digital armies could be conjured with a few keystrokes. To recreate the legendary battlefield on which Europe’s fate hinged in 1815, two mountain ranges in the Ukraine were reportedly levelled. It is said Bondarchuk commanded the seventh-largest army in the world at the time with some 17,000 Soviet troops drilled relentlessly to move as Napoleonic infantry, learning to march in column, form square and fire in synchronized volleys. This is spectacle on a scale modern filmmakers, bound by budgets and digital effects, can only dream of.

And what a spectacle it is. The battle sequences remain among the greatest ever committed to film - choreographed chaos captured with Bondarchuk’s signature bravura camerawork. His lens sweeps across vast columns of infantry, then plunges into the inferno of hand-to-hand combat. The use of helicopter shots, zoom lenses and tracking shots lends a sense of feverish momentum, a dizzying immersion into the storm of battle.

If the sheer scale of Waterloo remains unmatched, its performances are no less remarkable. Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer, as Napoleon and Wellington respectively, are splendidly well-matched. Steiger plays the French Emperor as an operatic titan, rolling his eyes, roaring in defiance, then melting into a tearful farewell as he boards the ship to Elba. It is a performance that flirts with excess but never quite succumbs. If Napoleon was, as he declared, an actor on history’s grandest stage, then Steiger channels him perfectly - an exhausted genius, trapped by the myth of his own invincibility.

Plummer is his antithesis, as Wellington must be. His Duke is cool, wry, almost disdainful of the Frenchman’s theatricality. If Steiger’s Napoleon is fire and fury, Plummer’s Wellington is all ice and precision. The contrast is exquisite. Their duel is not merely fought with cannon and cavalry but with personality, the implacable logic of one clashing against the desperate audacity of the other.

For all its splendour, Waterloo was a commercial failure. Producer Dino De Laurentiis blamed it on the lack of a true marquee name. Beyond the cannon fire, ‘Waterloo’ is, at times, a strangely melancholic film, courtesy Nino Rota’s score. His music for the famous waltz scene, for instance, is pure cinematic poetry: the camera glides over elegantly dressed nobles, twirling in carefree oblivion, even as history gathers like storm clouds on the horizon.

Could such a film be made today? No. Those yearning for the sheer physicality of real soldiers on a real battlefield, ‘Waterloo’ remains a marvel. It is the kind of film that will never be made again - because no one dares to make them like this anymore.