Alexander the dud

Rating: 1/10 (28 September 2009)

There is a scene between Alexander and his wife Roxanne in which Alexander violently rips off Roxanne's clothes against her will, she responds by putting a knife to his throat and things are only resolved when Alexander speaks some gentler words and they end up making passionate love.
This, no doubt, is director Oliver Stone's (and his writers) view of Western involvement in the middle East from Alexander through the Crusades to Bush and their hopes for the future. The metaphor (simplistic and unhistorical as it is) may have worked, too had this whole scene not been shot as soft porn which tends to undermine its message.
Much the same could be said of the whole film, an oddly constructed and badly written farrago of ideas, mostly non-historical. A lot has been made of the homoeroticism but that is somewhat more accurate than many other aspects of the film. Alexander is portrayed as the world's first multiculturalist, something which would surprise Arabs who still invoke his name to frighten children even to this day. Stone and his writers are more interested in Alex spouting platitudes about respecting the Persians ancient culture rather than his belief in the superiority of Greece over the barbarians.
Alexander's wife Roxanne, when she is not required to do full frontals, contributes very little to the film apart from a few pouty looks. Since the story is light on females, Alex's mother, played by Angelina Jolie is drafted in, her contribution being to read a few letters written to Alex from Macedonia. It sounds unconvincing, and it is.
Jolie speaks in an odd Russian accent for some unexplained reason and the whole matter of accents in this film is a strange one. The Macedonians are all Irish and the Greeks English. This is surprising but not the worst sin in this film.
The main narrative thread is given to Anthony Hopkins to read in a an unconvincing voice over. This seems more designed to paper over awkward historical facts than to be organically part of the film. The whole thing seems choppily edited and directed with a mishmash of devices used to no artistic purpose. For example: at one point late on, up to that time completely linear (apart from Hopkins narrative), lurches back 8 years to see the murder of Alex's father. After this lengthy interpolation, which would have been better integrated earlier in the film, we lunge back to 'the present' where the remainder continues in linear fashion. A small point, but one among very many which leaves you to ask why the director has made the decisions he has.
Despite all these devices the film is still inordinately long and slow rather like the constant snake imagery used through out (and which is clearly meant to be a metaphor for something. but what?)
It is not surprising, given such a duff script, that the actors are reduced to giving a lot of meaningful looks reminiscent of daytime soap-operas.
Bad.