It's so out of focus, you don't remember he's great until you're told!

Rating: 5/10 (25 November 2004)

This film is flawed from start to finish, though it has admirable moments. The images that are flashed before you are often beautiful, but you are rarely afforded a meaning behind them. Alexander is rich with emotions, but as an audience member you don't experience any of them, and are almost unsure why the actors are feeling them...
The main thing that this film lacks is any sense of direction, and a clear picture at what we are to be expecting when it gets to its destination. Scenes are thrown together is seemingly random order, though the general movement of scenes is in chronological order. When jumping from scene to scene the viewer begins to wonder just what purpose that scene will play in the larger picture, and in most cases the answer is none. It seems as if the battles displayed in the film were picked merely because of Oliver Stone's desire to shoot them, though the battle for Persia was quite possibly the most important victory in Alexander's campaign. Of course the film fails miserably in stressing that fact to the audience. Several long and arduous scenes seem to have no reason at all for being there. It is not that they wouldn't play well to showing the effects of Alexander's actions on his popularity amongst the world, it's that fact that Oliver Stone fails to display these effects at all throughout the movie. We are told that Alexander is more or less loved by our ever active narrator, though we are never shown it.
Maybe the worst flaw of the entire movie is the disproportional focus of the picture. We are shown countless numbers of scenes in which Alexander reveals his dependence on, and love for Hephaistion. Not only do these scenes become more and more uncomfortable as time goes on, they do nothing to further the story. We simply see nearly identical dialogue played out while the characters embrace, and we are once again 'introduced' to the idea that Alexander was likely a bisexual. In fact, this ever boring tale of "I love you. I still love you. If you died I couldn't go on. You've died, I can't go on!" takes center stage over Alexander as a person and over Alexander's achievements.
In the final moments of the film Anthony Hopkins, our beloved narrator, tells us in finality that Alexander truly was great; a god amongst men in fact. It is in that moment that you realize that after three hours of film, you're pretty much going to have to take his word for it. Even at that point, you would assume that if the message of the entire film had been lost in a muddled mess of an ever unchanging tale of male companionship, that you would have at least had an interest in it. Truthfully, the viewer is never given any reason to care about what happens to Hephaistion at all. His character is almost used exclusively as a vehicle for displaying the homosexual nature of Alexander.
Overall, the film ended up being the failed vision of a director who clearly put a lot into the film. The unfortunateness of the whole affair is that the viewer never really gets anything out of the experience.