During a battle in the Aragonese town of Saragossa (Zaragoza) during the Napoleonic Wars, an officer retreats to the second floor of an inn. He finds a large book with drawings of two men hanging on a gallows and two women in a bed. An enemy officer tries to arrest him but ends up translating the book for him; the second officer recognizes its author as his own grandfather, who was a captain in the Walloon Guard.
On the eve of the French Revolution, Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) is informed that her father (Henry B. Walthall) is not dead, but has been a prisoner in the Bastille for many long years before finally being released. She travels to Paris to take her father to her home in England. Dr. Manette has been taken care of by a friend, Ernest Defarge (Mitchell Lewis), and his wife (Blanche Yurka). The old man's mind has given way during his long ordeal, but Lucie's tender care begins to restore his sanity.
In 1809, Sir Arthur Wellesley (David Troughton), the commander of the British army fighting the French in Portugal, is saved from three pursuing French cavalrymen by Sergeant Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean). Wellesley rewards Sharpe with a field promotion to lieutenant and command of the "chosen men", a handful of sharpshooters previously led by Rifleman Patrick Harper (Daragh O'Malley). The two men take an instant dislike to each other.
Sharpe participates in the Battle of Toulouse, at the end of the Peninsular War. On the other side are French General Calvet (John Benfield) and Sharpe's nemesis, Ducos (Féodor Atkine), who is in charge of Napoleon's treasury. During the fighting, Sharpe encounters and humiliates Ducos, but lets him escape with his life. Napoleon loses the war and is sent into exile.
In 1813, Napoleon is reeling from his disastrous invasion of Russia the year before, and Lord Wellington is preparing to drive the French out of Spain. Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean) is mourning the death of his wife Teresa.
When Napoleon (James Tolkan) invades Austria during the Napoleonic Wars, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen), a coward and pacifist scholar, is forced to enlist in the Russian Army. Desperate and disappointed after hearing the news that Sonja (Diane Keaton), his cousin twice removed, is to wed a herring merchant, he inadvertently becomes a war hero. He returns and marries the recently widowed Sonja, who does not want to marry Boris, but promises him that she will when she thinks that he is about to be killed in a duel. Their marriage is filled with philosophical debates, and no money. Their life together is interrupted when Napoleon invades the Russian Empire. Boris wants to flee but his wife, angered that the invasion will interfere with their plans to start a family that year, conceives a plot to assassinate Napoleon at his headquarters in Moscow. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical double-talk, and Boris reluctantly goes along with it. They fail to kill Napoleon and Sonja escapes arrest while Boris is executed, despite being told by a vision that he will be pardoned.
In 1792 during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, a secret league of brave Englishmen are rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine. The leader of this secret society is a mysterious English nobleman known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose signature sign is a humble wayside flower. In society he hides his identity by posing as the wealthy but foppish and seemingly empty-headed Sir Percy Blakeney (Anthony Andrews). After rescuing the Count de Beaulieu and his family, Percy is introduced to the beautiful French actress Marguerite St. Just (Jane Seymour) through her brother, Armand (Malcolm Jamieson), whom he rescued from an attack. Percy is attracted to Marguerite, but she is in a relationship with Paul Chauvelin (Ian McKellen), an agent of Maximilien Robespierre. Due to the Scarlet Pimpernel's past successes, Chauvelin is assigned to discover his identity and capture him.
Les événements relatés dans les deux parties de La Révolution française sont nombreux. Les producteurs ont voulu relever le défi inédit de couvrir l’ensemble de la période révolutionnaire et donc tous ses principaux événements (ce qui en fait d'ailleurs un film pédagogique malgré son parti pris clairement dantoniste). L'œuvre passe cependant très vite sur la guerre de Vendée, qui n’est mentionnée que quatre fois, notamment par Robespierre et Desmoulins, qui dénonce le massacre d’ « un peuple entier ». Le film se termine sur l’exécution de Robespierre et Saint-Just en 1794 et omet d'évoquer la suite des événements. Toutefois, la Révolution française s'étend jusqu'en 1799, année du coup d'État de Napoléon Bonaparte.
It is 1814. There is peace in Europe as a defeated Napoleon is sent into exile on the island of Elba. Major Sharpe (Sean Bean) is assigned to head the Scarsdale Yeomanry in his native Yorkshire, depriving him of a chance to settle the score with his adulterous wife Jane (Abigail Cruttenden) and her lover, Lord Rossendale (Alexis Denisof).
Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel (a fictional animal from the Ice Age film series), while trying to find a place to hide his acorn, finds a buried time machine that states the date he's currently in (May 26, 20,000 BC) next to the ice-encased skeletal body of a human time traveler. He accidentally activates the machine, sending the acorn away. Scrat gets mad and tries to beat up the time machine and it sends him to the Middle Ages. Finding the acorn wedged under a rock, Scrat sees Excalibur and decides to use it as a lever to move the rock. He pulls out the sword but then finds himself under attack by a group of unseen archers, and uses the sword to block the arrows fired by the archers. He frees the acorn in the process and takes it and the time machine and races off to find cover, only to hide in the barrel of a cannon. The cannon fires him into the path of hundreds of incoming arrows. The time machine teleports the acorn mid-flight and Scrat just barely manages to activate the machine again for himself.
The film takes place in May of 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars. Captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey of HMS Surprise is ordered to pursue the French privateer Acheron, and "Sink, Burn, or take her as a Prize." As the film opens, the British warship is ambushed by Acheron; Surprise is heavily damaged, while its own cannon fire does not penetrate the enemy ship's hull. Using smaller boats, the crew of Surprise tow the ship into a fog bank and evade pursuit. Aubrey learns from a crewman who saw Acheron being built that it is heavier and faster than Surprise, and the senior officers consider the ship out of their class. Aubrey notes that such a ship could tip the balance of power in Napoleon's favour if allowed to plunder the British whaling fleet at will. He orders pursuit of Acheron, rather than returning to port for repairs. Acheron again ambushes Surprise, but Aubrey slips away in the night by using a clever decoy buoy and ships lamps.
Bess Nugent (Rosaleen Linehan) and her daughter Ellie (Jayne Ashbourne), visit their close relative Lord Wellington (Hugh Fraser) in Spain during the Peninsular War. They are there to search for Bess's husband, Will (Peter Eyre). Wellington however refuses to assist their foolhardy mission, demanding they go home to Ireland.