Director Ridley Scott has achieved the impossible—making Napoleon Bonaparte boring. //

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring. //

Ultimately, the film feels like a disengaged fifth grader’s petulant history project. It takes pains to note when and where each event takes place, as if to say, “Hey, audience, see this? It actually happened, please care about it,” without allowing the events to breathe.

This slavish obsession with accuracy seems an extreme overcorrection from “Gladiator,” where Scott butchered the historical record but captured the heart of Roman virtue. Here, Scott has preserved the history only by carefully excising the drama and passion that audiences expect from a blockbuster film. //

As if an afterthought, the movie serves up two spectacles of battle: Austerlitz and Waterloo, but manages to remove any real drama from those famous conflagrations. In each case, the audience has no sense of why the battles are important, what Napoleon and his opponents are trying to achieve, and why they should care about the men dying before their eyes.

By contrast, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” provides a masterclass in battle storytelling. The Battle of Helm’s Deep delivers an awesome spectacle of fascinating siege tactics, setting and fulfilling audience expectations, and making audiences care by placing the main characters at the heart of the action. Viewers have a stake in the twists and turns of the battle because they have gotten to know and care about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Gimli (John Rhys Davies), who are intimately involved in the fighting.

By contrast, audiences in “Napoleon” see nameless, faceless soldiers fighting in ranks they don’t understand, with Napoleon in the distance commanding things. The film has spent no time explaining why the battle matters, what the ramifications are for France if Napoleon loses, and why viewers should care about those doing the fighting. All we know is that this is a massive battle, and Napoleon is in control, so we should just watch and eat our popcorn.

The problem with this approach is that it tosses all the drama out the window. //

I got the sense that if someone could just sit down with Scott and tell him, “Hey, here’s why Napoleon’s important, and why he’s actually interesting,” perhaps we would have got something a little more like “Gladiator” and a little less like “Real Housewives of Revolutionary Paris.” ///

History should be taught as drama; to do that, one has to connect with historical people, understand why they matter, and the consequences of their action or inaction. Then the dates and events make sense.