Molasses-drenched and truly annoying

Rating: 1/10 (17 June 2005)

Alexander was one of the dullest, slowest films I have ever seen. I can handle slow films. Many slow films are true masterpieces- (insert here some great examples that have yet to pop into my frontal lobes). Ooh, kind of like Alien. Slow, slow start, and then picks up the pace. 2001. Finding Neverland. But this was just...gah. It plodded along at a cold-molasses-in-tar-pit-in-ice-age speed. Much of the plot was incomprehensible. The pink fight scene was irritating. I actually wandered off and poked in on other films and played some of the games in the lobby. By the time I crashed back into the theater I swear, honest to god, that Alexander was still on the same sentence. When the film's credits finally creeped along the screen, many people were asleep, being shaken awake by family members unlucky enough to have held consciousness through all five thousand hours of nothing.
I felt guilty about spending half an hour in the lobby playing pinball and gorging myself on popcorn refills, so I bought a second ticket and saw the film again with one thought: "I am going to sit through this thing if it kills me." So I did. Of course, not much of it was spent in consciousness- scenes jumped ahead for no apparent reason until halfway through I realised I'd been asleep in bits. I managed to stay awake through the remainder of the film, surviving my gnawing my knees off. I could barely remember any of the film, it creeped along so slowly. And I left the cinema depressed that we've evolved thousands of years and we land ourselves with this.
What was bad about the film? Well, for one thing it was...s....l....o....o....w....w..... Even the action sequences were s...l...o...w... Hell, the sex scenes went something like "p...e...l...v...i...c... t...h...r...u...s...t... a........h.......h......" Second, bad acting. Terrible. I don't know what they were doing on screen, but it seemed like everyone had drunk five gallons of Robitussin and then ate snails off of the streets of Las Angeles before filming. Then, we have the rather bizarre pink sequence where everyone on screen is dying and Alexander is dying and the audience is dying or having acid flashbacks of pink elephants. No joke, you actually see pink elephants in this film.
What was good? I'm going to clichÃ© your intestines out your ears, but it's true- the ending. It felt like I was a man who'd been tortured for five days straight and then was pumped full of marijuana. It felt goooood.
And the nap did me well, too.