Movie Review: Alexander

Alexander

Making a movie about Alexander the Great is a longtime dream of famed director Oliver Stone.. Being a fan myself of ancient history, and familiar with the usual quality of Stone's work, I've been looking forward for months to the release of Alexander. If only I'd known then what I know now...

Alexander opens with an old man (as it turns out, he's Ptolemy in the person of Sir Anthony Hopkins) talking about the life of Alexander. And then, accompanied by his ongoing narration, we're swept back some 40 years to the beginning of what would become legend. Alexander (played as a young boy by Conner Paolo who is an amazing lookalike for the star of the film) is coddled by his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), and the object of a hot and cold relationship with his father, King Philip II of Macedonia (Val Kilmer). That's probably because Philip has some doubts as to the legitimacy of the child his wife has borne him. But Philip sees to it that Alexander is well educated (his teacher is Aristotle, played by Christopher Plummer), and as he's filled with the stories of legendary heroes, he becomes determined to be an even greater conquerer than his father (among his idols is the infamous Achilles).

As a young man, Alexander (Colin Farrell) has a reasonable relationship with Philip, but Olympias is concerned he may lose his place as heir when Philip's new wife gives birth to a son. All of her worries, however, come to naught when Philip is assassinated and Alexander takes the throne. Along with his boyhood friend—and lover—Hephaistion (Jared Leto), Alexander wastes little time in moving to conquer Persia. With his finely trained army and an ability to motivate even the most reluctant or fearful to battle, Alexander finds himself the king of the known world by the time he's 25. He marries Roxane (Rosario Dawson), a Persian woman, in part to cement loyalty to him among the Persians, but largely because he wants a son. But after several years filled by ongoing battles and the conquering of even more territory, Alexander's troops want only to go home and he must turn his attention to holding his army together.

With political intrigue all around him, his mother's manipulative letters arriving on a regular basis, Roxane's failure to become pregnant, and an assassination attempt, Alexander is as exhausted and frustrated as all of his men. But as the army turns to the south and into India, the bloodiest battle of them all could see Alexander lose everything.

The story of Alexander the Great begs for a director like Oliver Stone to handle it. It's epic in reality let alone in the layers of myth that sprung up about the life of Alexander even while he still lived. While I continue to believe that Stone could have made this a truly epic movie, I'm sorry to say that he failed in this attempt to do so.

The script, it seemed, couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to depict reality or myth, and so it inserted bits of the supernatural here and there which in turn made the truth unbelievable. With so many incidents in his life to address, Stone should have focused on a few of the most salient (the only scene which, in my opinion, got the time its import was due was when a 12 year-old Alexander gets his horse, Bucephalus, from his father by taming it before the very eyes of the skeptical king). Instead, many scenes were only a few lines long, and the jump to the next unrelated scene jarring at best. There was some beautiful film footage from the viewpoint of an eagle, but was there some mysterious point? The reaction of Olympias to the appearance of an eagle late in the film would seem to indicate there was, but who knows for sure?

The costuming was extraordinary as were some of the sets; other sets, most notably the library at Alexandria, just looked plastic and cheap. (Silk plants, anybody?) The effects during the battle scenes were terrific; but the camera work during the battle scenes was uneven at best, and was at times a distraction rather than an enhancement. Quick edits fading in and out of each other were meant, I'm sure, to add to the confusion and excitement of battle as well as to hide the choreography, but they were almost nauseating in their blurry hodge-podge.

Colin Farrell is a very good actor. The blonde dye job on his hair, however, is one of the worst I've ever seen. I can think of no excuse whatsoever on a movie of this size to spare the few dollars it would have cost to do the star's hair properly. Angelina Jolie is also an incredible performer. But her accent seemed over the top, especially when some people spoke with accents I assume were to be Greek; others spoke with Irish (Farrell) or English (several in the supporting cast) or American (Val Kilmer) accents. And in another real failing of the script, all spoke terribly stilted and awkwardly phrased lines (ancient Greeks didn't speak English, so don't pretend authenticity as an excuse) which made them sound silly when it was readily understandable at all.

In short, the story of Alexander is fascinating. His effect on the world that came after him is incalculable. This movie, aside from being long and largely unexciting (the battle scenes, particularly one in India, are an exception), is an insult to Alexander's legacy as well as to our intelligence.

POLITICAL NOTES: As American troops remain in Iraq, it's impossible not to take note of the general parallel of Alexander's invasion of Persia. I was also unable to ignore Alexander's assurances to his closest advisors that he was there to set the people of Persia free, and that he fully intended to go from territory to territory doing the same thing for other peoples. He mentions the idea of different tribes and races melding together (something some of his followers, believing Greeks to be superior to others, didn't take too kindly) and living in peace under one rule. While much of this is in the movie because it was in Alexander's life, it's eerie to say the least to listen to these onscreen pronouncements in light of current world events.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: Alexander is rated R for "violence and some sexuality/nudity." There is some graphic violence displayed in the battle scenes, particularly where animals are concerned (it may tell you something as to the movie's quality yet again that I felt worse about the animals apparently being hurt in some scenes than I did about the people dying all around them). There's one scene containing female nudity; and there's a strong undercurrent (occasionally overt) of homoexuality throughout the movie (to be fair, the Greeks considered the basis of attraction to be beauty rather than solely gender, so this behavior was not only normal but common at that time), neither of which are suitable for younger kids. If you can get a 14 year-old to sit still for three hours of what is a mostly mediocre movie, 14 is probably old enough to see the film. But it'll take someone older and far more patient to be able to sit through the entire three hours of Alexander without considerable effort.