Shoddy work

Rating: 5/10 (27 November 2005)

Alexander has all the element of a great epic movie. It has massive battles, beautiful locations and re-created cities from the past. That's why it's rather disappointing, that the film is ruined whit poor editing and shattered narration.
Biggest flaw of the film is, that it's really hard to identify with anyone: all characters just drift along the given time scape whit only definitive center point of Alexanders world conquest. Then there's the build up of tension of the story which is strangely enough done in very late part of the movie, which is far too late, when placed in the context of the movie's length.
The movie cost 150 million dollars or so. It shows in the massive scenes, but then there are some scene, which look poorly and shoddily made. Most of the scenes with Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) look extremely fake. Also some of the CGI'ed camera drives on the battle fields are ridden with such problems. And speaking of battles, some of the scenes are rather fuzzy, so it's sometimes hard to tell what's going on.
I did find it strange, that all the characters spoke with poorly selected accents, as they didn't serve any bigger purpose and sounded rather awkward. It wouldn't have mattered if EVERYONE would have used a accent, but there was lots of characters who didn't use an accent or used different accent even though they were from the same place as the others.
My final nail to the review: Music. Sure, I like Vangelis. I have Blade Runner soundtrack. But Alexander's soundtrack is very unfit for the film. It mostly creates wrong atmosphere for the situations.
There are some great scenes in the film, but as I said it felt shoddily done and, I even dare to say, in some places it was quite amateurish. And that was pretty odd.