Alexander the Gay?

Rating: 2/10 (29 October 2006)

First, I have to get this off my chest: How the hell can it be June in 4th Century B.C. Babylon?
Whew. That's better. Anyway, that should have been sufficient warning, but no, I stayed, and all too soon my perverted appetite for bad movies kicked in. I wish I'd had court-ordered unnecessary eye surgery under local anaesthetic instead of having watched this. Better memories.
I was prepared to accept the whole Greek thing with the love between men, I really was, what with Achilles and the begenitalled statuary and the American Puritanical prudishness and all, but I was not prepared to sit through what felt like six hours of spycam at a gay Hollywood cast party. I know where to go for that sort of film if I want it. I don't.
Prurient excess aside, to portray Alexander as a modern queer is laughable anachronism. Who knows what he really did? But he certainly must have been a bad-ass warrior with a lust for life and for combat that would seem almost insane to us, and not the gloopy, moody drama queen this movie makes of him. You can't command an army, much less an empire, by force of angst. Stone's Alexander is a silly caricature of perhaps the greatest general the world has ever seen.
I didn't want this review to be about the homosexuality thing. The movie stinks enough in other ways to rate a scathing pan, but blame Stone, not me. This movie is nothing more in the final analysis than a slap-dash apology for the gay-rights movement.