Set in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the film focuses on a series of duels between two rival officers, the obsessive Bonapartist Gabriel Feraud (played by Harvey Keitel) and royalist Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine), that spans nearly 20 years and reflects the political tumult of early 19th-century France.

The film is based on Joseph Conrad's short story "The Duel" (titled "Point of Honor" in the United States), first published in A Set of Six.

[3] The Duellists earned widespread acclaim from critics, who praised Scott's direction and visuals, and the film's historical authenticity.

In Strasbourg in 1800, Lieutenant Gabriel Feraud of the French 7th Hussars, a fervent Bonapartist and obsessive duellist, nearly kills the nephew of the city's mayor in a duel.

Under pressure from the mayor, Brigadier-General Treillard orders one of his officers, Lieutenant Armand d'Hubert of the 3rd Hussars, to place Feraud under house arrest.

While recovering, d'Hubert takes fencing lessons and in the next duel, the men fight to a bloody standstill, too tired to hold their swords they fall to the ground in a wrestle but this is broken apart by the onlookers.

After Napoleon's exile to Elba, d'Hubert is now a brigadier-general recovering from a wartime injury at the home of his sister Leonie in Tours.

Meanwhile, a solitary Feraud faces ending his days in provincial exile, locked away like his beloved Emperor, and unable to pursue the obsession of dueling that has consumed him for so many years.

[14] Scott's first choices to play the lead roles were Oliver Reed and Michael York, the stars of The Three Musketeers, but they proved unavailable or out of the film's budget range.

Paramount Pictures gave Scott a list of four actors from which to choose for the two leads, which he had to agree to in order to receive financing.

Carradine and Keitel, both Americans, chose not to adapt accents to match their British co-stars, believing their natural idiolects better reflected their character's class and ideological backgrounds.

[15] The last scene references paintings of the former emperor in his South Atlantic exile (e.g. Napoleon on Saint Helena by Franz Josef Sandmann).

[16] The film holds a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 61 reviews, with an average score of 7.3/10 and the critical consensus: "Rich, stylized visuals work with effective performances in Ridley Scott's take on Joseph Conrad's Napoleonic story, resulting in an impressive feature film debut for the director.

Sometimes it's all too much, yet the camerawork, which is by Frank Tidy, provides the Baroque style by which the movie operates on our senses, making the eccentric drama at first compelling and ultimately breathtaking.

"[17] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "The Duellists is an epic yarn; we sit back and observe it, and it's consistently entertaining—and eerily beautiful.

"[18] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The story might have worked if there were an undercurrent of attractiveness to Keitel's loutish character.

"[20] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the sword fights were "the best I've ever seen" and called the story "refreshingly different from standard film content.

"[22] David Ansen of Newsweek wrote, "The best you can say about the film – the directing debut of Ridley Scott – is that it provides an unusually civilized experience in these days of movie barbarism… The worst that can be said is that Keitel and Carradine are so perversely cast as French hussars that, whenever they speak, the splendid illusion of nineteenth-century Europe is shattered.

"[23] The film is lauded for its historically authentic portrayal of Napoleonic uniforms and military conduct, as well as its generally accurate early-19th-century fencing techniques as recreated by fight choreographer William Hobbs.