From its first frames, director Ridley Scott’s new epic, Napoleon, makes both its political subtext and attitude toward history clear. “1789, Revolution in France,” its opening titles announce. “The French have become disillusioned by food shortages and widespread economic depression. Anti-Royalists would soon send King Louis XVI and 11,000 of his supporters to a violent end and then set their sights on the last Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile, an ambitious Corsican gunnery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte seeks a promotion . . . ” A terrified Marie Antoinette is then led to her fate at the guillotine as a braying Parisian mob looks on, hurling insults and rotten vegetables. As the executioner holds her severed head aloft to the cheering crowd, Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon Bonaparte observes the scene with an expression of cryptic ambivalence.

Big-budget blockbusters, especially those on well-known historical figures and events, often hedge their bets for the sake of broadness. But, right from its outset, Napoleon proudly brandishes its conservatism. Its French Revolution is neither one of radical possibility and intellectual ferment nor a morally complex historical rupture in which the economic and institutional breakdowns of the ancien régime  — not to mention relentless invasion by the monarchies of old Europe — gave rise to violent civil conflict. Instead, operating within a tradition traceable to intellectuals like Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke, and more recently the centrist historian François Furet, Scott shows us a revolution whose egalitarian idealism can lead only to grayness, despotism, and blood.

As far as historical accuracy goes, anyone with even a passing knowledge of this period will find the speed of Scott’s opening sequence jarring. Antoinette’s execution occurred in 1793, but Napoleon lurches from the 1789–1792 period of constitutional monarchy to the republicanism of the revolution’s radical phase without missing a beat — among other things setting in motion an absolutely breathless pace that takes us from these beginnings to Napoleon Bonaparte’s final exile on Saint Helena in less than three hours.