Not bad, but certainly not good

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 2008)

Hollywood directors are certain that they know what we want to see. They know what puts asses in seats. So when they have a real chance (and enough extras) to show us a modicum of accuracy regarding ancient battles, over and over again they say to us: "Naw, you don't want to see that. You want to see Braveheart in it's 80th incarnation. Trust me." The history is there for anyone to read. How did our ancestors do it? How did they combine superior training, metallurgy, discipline, and morale, all on the bedrock of culture, to create a military machine that sometimes achieved kill ratios of 30-to-1 over it's Eastern enemies? How did they study the enemy and develop countermeasures to his strengths? The importance of tactics, choosing ground, flanking movements, maintaining vital formations and unit cohesion; Stone, Scott and their ilk don't care about any of this. They ask themselves: "If I had naught but sword and shield, how would I fight?" Then they make a movie. That's why we have gaps in the line large enough to drive a semi through, and phalangites attempting to fight off elephants in the thickest forest Oliver Stone could find.
My main problem with this film, however, is that the personage of Alexander the Great never makes an appearance. Instead Stone has given us a pseudo-Alexander, a weepy little flower played by Farrell (who is NOT leading man material for any film) whose every syllable is leaden with emotion and self-doubt, who is always on the verge of tears, and who above all wants his daddy to wuv him. Nowhere to be seen is the young man who took 47,000 men and took all of modern Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan and who never lost a battle. Nowhere is the supremely confident strategos who broke enemy lines with his cavalry charges and whose enemies, toward the end, thought him a god walking the earth. Yes, he may have been a drunk, and he may have enjoyed pederasty. But he was also the most successful and magnificent military commander in recorded history. You'd never know it from this movie. The real Alexander was folded steel to Farrell's soggy loaf of bread.
So, what Stone got right: the uniforms and armor, historical names and references, and to a lesser extent formations. What he got wrong: everything else.