Customer Reviews

Campaigns of Napoleon Boxed Set Volume 2

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This set of three documentaries follows the same format set forth in volume 1, which I explain in my review for it, including old footage from movies or TV with narration and rapturous story-telling.

Unfortunately here, with three documentaries, all fail to be more than simply "average", compared to volume 1.

Disc 1 is about the Battle of Trafalgar, a famous naval battle, which judging from how the BRITISH historians and BRITISH narrator and BRITISH production cast portray it, could never have been won by the French if they had 100 times the numbers and all the Britons had one arm tied behind their backs and their legs tied together. The majority of this documentary consists of telling how powerful English morale and discipline and training was, and how piss-poor French morale and discipline and training was, and how Admiral Villeneau was a doomed scapegoat and the French could not possibly have dealt any sort of damage to the mighty British fleet no matter what.

It also features an ugly actor portraying some random bandit with an accent so badly "piratey" garbled that he's barely coherent.

The documentary on Trafalgar was so obsessed with how great British naval troops were and how great their tactics were that very little of it was actually dedicated to how the battle progressed, beyond "Flagship 1 raked Ships 3 and 4, and Flagship 1 of THE FILTHY DIRTY FRENCH SCUM attacked GLORIOUS FLAGSHIP 3 FEATURING JESUS CHRIST INCARNATE AND THE SAVIOUR OF ALL MANKIND ADMIRAL LORD NELSON THE GREATEST OF ALL GREATS IN ALL HUMANITY AND THE HEAVENS!"

Disc 2 is about the Battle of Borodino, and it's very much by-the-books without anything remarkable or interesting about it. Pretty much everything here and more was already covered in the volume 1 documentary about the entire Russian campaign.

Disc 3 is a summary of the entire campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte. HOWEVER, this is a lie/misnomer/error, as the only campaigns it seems to cover is those that were ALREADY COVERED in volume 1 or volume 2 of this series; it skims over Napoleon's rise to power in less than 5 or 6 minutes, mentions every part of his career before 1805 with almost disinterest, and makes frequent mention of a naval battle in the Nile River, but no more than just mention of the name "Battle of the Nile" and "English victory" and Napoleon abandoning his army in France.

Almost nothing else is touched on except what was touched on in greater detail in the previous documentaries: Trafalgar, Austerlitz, insanely long gap from 1805 to 1812 with the Russian Campaign, and Waterloo, featuring some of the exact same footage and repetition of what was ALREADY SHOWN in previous documentaries.

And so, anything I learned here could either be construed as blatant British propaganda, or just re-iteration of what I learned from Volume 1's box set.

Certainly a well-collected sets of Documentary films on Napoleon's Campaigns. Engaging and enriching to give anyone a good background information and knowledge on how Napoleon conducted his military campaigns.