Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2004)

I caught this at the Stockholm International Film Festival of 2004. The theme of this year's festival was Oliver Stone and they showed several of his older (and better) films. Also there was an interview with Stone at the festival (although he was nowhere to be seen the day i watched this).
Alexander is the story of Alexander the Great who conquered large parts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His armies went as far from his native Greece (or Macedonia as the movie states) as to India in his quest for more land to conquer. During his short life (he died at 33) he became the ruler of most of the known world and spread the western culture to many lands.
Oliver Stone is an interesting director in my opinion. In my eyes he has always been capable both of great film-making (Platoon, Wall Street) and utter garbage (Natural Born Killers, U-turn, Comandante). But it seems lately his track-record is beginning to lose it's shine since most of the utter garbage he's made is later in his career. Unfortunately this borders on garbage.
When i've read reviews here (and on other sites, not in papers since the movie is not released in Europe when i write this) i often see many references to the homosexual content in this film. Which i find surprising since that content feels more or less non-existent. Sure Alexander kisses a man and expresses affection for another, but it's not even clear whether this is proof he was bi-sexual. Anyway, the reason i bring it up is that i want to make clear it had nothing to do with my rating of this film.
So, what's wrong with Alexander? Well the script is the main thing. It feels to me like the script emphasized the wrong things. We never get to know Alexander, never get to crawl under his skin and know the man he was. Instead, every time he's on screen he's either weeping or making a speech. It's the same with all the characters, they come out as extremely shallow cardboard figures. Instead of developing the characters, Stone tries to make the narrator drive the story ahead. This could have worked in a more story-driven movie, but this movie is centered on Alexander as a person and a king, which makes this a problem.
Also, the editing is terrible in many ways. For instance, the first battle fought in the movie against the Persians ends very abruptly. Alexander attempts to beat the Persian king's army of 250.000 men (with his own army of 40.000) by killing the king himself, hoping that will stop his men from fighting. The attempt is failed and Alexander barely escapes with his life. Then suddenly the scene is cut, and the next scene shows Alexander marching into Babylon after his victory against the Persians... Editing like this, and the fact that the movie jumps 8 years forward and back a couple of times, doesn't really help the experience.
The acting is another thing. I think Colin Farrell did a very good job portraying Alexander. It's not his fault that the character felt shallow and uninteresting, he undoubtedly did his best. Angelina Jolie on the other hand was a catastrophe. She screamed and looked menacingly at everyone, and her Russian accent is completely misplaced and uncalled for. The accents were a chapter of their own. All of the Greeks spoke a kind of Scottish/Irish accent that there is no real explanation to.
So, in the end, what can i say to sum things up? Well, Alexander sure looks nice enough. The battle scenes (the few there are) look very nice and certainly more interesting and well done than in Troy for instance. But the movie feels like it doesn't know what i wants to be. It's too shallow for a biography of Alexander, it's too muddled and messy to be story-driven, and there is way too little action for it to be action-driven. The end result is very slow, rather uninteresting and forgettable. I rate it 4/10 and conclude that the thing that will probably stay with me longest after this experience is the music. Vangelis hardly ever disappoints.