This movie is a mess

Rating: 1/10 (26 November 2004)

Rarely have I ever seen such a disjointed film. It alternates between florid and turgid, like Cecil B DeMille on a bad day. Its scale is vast, but lacks real grandeur. The two major battle scenes are confusing. In the first, the Battle of Gaugamela, there is a great shot showing the opening of the battle from an eagle's point of view, but this is the only shot which gives us any real sense of what is going on. Otherwise it's Macedonian hoplites and cavalry against Persians with the Persian king Darius deserting the field for no apparent reason (he has plenty of unused reserves and has clearly outflanked Alexander).
The second battle, against elephants in India, is merely confusing. And strange colors in part of the sequence -- red leaves on the trees -- doesn't help matters. Stone should sit down and watch some Kurosawa to see how to film a battle.
Anthony Hopkins, as Ptolomy, tries to let us know what is going on with narration. This is not entirely successful. For example, Alexander's conquest of Egypt is reduced to a couple sentences. There is also a flashback late in the film to the assassination of Alexander's father, Philip (Val Kilmer) It would have made more sense to have shown this in its proper place.
Colin Farrell, sporting the worst hair dye since Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, stumbles through his role as the sexually ambiguous, driven conqueror. His relationship with Hephaistion (Jared Leto with too much eye-liner) is curiously understated. The two men hug but never kiss and whether or not they go to bed together is only hinted at. There is a body servant of Alexander who seems spend much of his time just standing around, looking sloe-eyed.
Alexander marries, for no apparent reason, and against the advice of his generals, a woman named Roxana, with whom he has one night of passion and then promptly loses interest.
Alexander's relationship with his mother, played by Angelina Jolie, borders on the incestuous. She comes across as a combination of snake charmer, Lady Macbeth and stereotypical Jewish mother (she sends Alexander a letter that can be summed up as "you never call, you never write, why don't you come home and marry a nice Greek girl"). Jolie is far too young to be playing the adult Alexander's mother and speaks with an accent that sounds like Natasha Fatale. Most of the other Greeks speak with Irish accents, except for Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer and Brian Blessed who sound English.
Alexander keeps driving his troops onward for no apparent reason. Towards the end, some of them mutiny because they haven't seen their homes and families for over eight years. They are bogged down in an endless campaign in India. Alexander, in one of the worst speeches to the troops ever, can't give them a reason for not going home. So he just has the leaders of the mutiny killed and then gets into another battle in which he is nearly killed. Then he goes home, crossing a desert. A sequence which should have been reminiscent of Napoleon retreating from Moscow is reduced to one shot and a couple of lines of narration.
My basic problem with the film is that we never get any sense of why Alexander acted as he did. Farrell stumbles through his role, not giving us any real clues about the man himself. In any biography, we need to understand the main character. Apparently, neither Farrell nor Stone understand Alexander, so of course the audience doesn't understand him either.
One last comment: Alexander's death was such an homage (a kindlier word than "rip-off") to Citizen Kane that I expected him to say "Rosebud".