oh my...

Rating: 4/10 (12 December 2004)

This was one of those movies that had the occasional beautifully rendered moment, causing the viewers to raise their heads from their popcorn buckets foggily, only to dash their slim hopes yet again.
The story of one of the greatest, if not the greatest leaders of the "civilized world" is one that is truly fascinating and multi-layered. Oliver Stone unfortunately achieved neither with this movie. Instead of attempting to take the well known and not so well known characters and plumb the depths of the interwoven intrigue and emotional ties between them, he chose to make over sweeping generalizations that our jaded 21st century minds could follow. For example, instead of further exploring the trauma and turmoil that his mother and father's relationship had on him, he decided, "Alexander was rumored to be gay, so lets stick him in a short skirt and the worst wig job I've ever seen!" Instead of exploring the complexities of Alexander's and Hepastion's relationship, we got Jared Leto making the occasional puppy eyes at Farrell, wearing a lot of eye makeup.
How about trying to explain some of the conflict Alexander and his wife went through over the years, with her attempting to deal with his emotions being placed elsewhere? Instead we got one of the least sexy bedroom scenes ever filmed, even with rather in your face nudity and Farrell doing this weird growl/pant thing (I'm guessing this was supposed to be sexy).
Stone could of looked at how Phillip and Olympias' relationship fell to such lows, forever scarring Alexander. Instead we got another traumatizing bedroom scene (except this one was supposed to be) where we found out that Olympias really had a thing for snakes and Phillip liked his beer a bit too much.
While there were other issues with this film, such as the seemingly random soundtrack coming in behind yet another, slow motion closeup of Farrell's grin, or the rough transitions between Alexander's story and the retelling of it by Ptolemy 40 years later, it seems very hard to forgive the lack of good casting. And even when the casting was admirable, as in the case of Anthony Hopkins and Rosario Dawson, the characters were severely underused. Perhaps Stone didn't want actual acting to distract from this three hour spectacle.
The entire point of the story of Alexander is that it could not have happened with any other man. There was something magnetic about Alexander that caused hundred's of thousands of men to follow him all over Asia over thousands of miles. Farrell unfortunately lacked this magnetism, and he was not aided at all by the rather paint by numbers script. If Farrell was looking for another film to boost his image as a serious actor, I haven't the slightest idea why he picked this film.
What is ultimately sad about this film though, is that there are the occasional brilliant moments. Although the entire eagle imagery got rather tired by the end of the film, there's one scene with it that brings Olympias to her knees, and rightly so. In another part, we see hints of the emotional turmoil inside Alexander when he has recurring flashbacks to his childhood. In these and other moments, Stone just keeps teasing the audience with further characterization but never follows through. It's a shame really that this film loses so much steam. One can only hope that future generations do not look to this film for clarification of what Alexander the Great was truly like.