Spoilproof Alert

Rating: 1/10 (30 December 2004)

I must first say that there is NO way I could spoil this movie no matter what I might write about it. Oliver Stone spoiled it long before I ever got to see it. This is the only movie I've ever seen where afterward I felt cheated enough to ask for my money back. I got it, too.
Where to begin? Alexander the Great was a conqueror, but we only get to see two of the many battles he fought. Gaugamela began promisingly, but then the overhead battle scenes were all filmed during a titanic dust storm so that it was impossible to tell who was fighting...or even if anyone was fighting. The closeup battle scenes appear to have been filmed by a shaky man with a camcorder bouncing on a pogo stick during an earthquake accompanied by a slightly less dense dust storm. The second battle scene had a jungle obscuring most of the activity and most of it was shot through a bad red filter anyway. We get a LOT more footage than that suggesting that Alexander was really, really, really gay.
Take away the conquering, and what do you have left? Nothing worth the price of admission. They gave the actor playing Alexander (who spent most of the time with a deer-in-the-headlights stare) a hair dye job that looked like a pile of old straw on his head. Having done that, couldn't they have done something about his thick, black woolly-bear caterpillar eyebrows? Every time he was on camera my gaze was drawn irresistibly towards them.
Early on in the film we are treated to a CGI image of the great harbor at Alexandria over the shoulder of Hannibal Lecter Ptolemy as he begins talking about Alexander to a scribe. In the harbor can be seen two ships under way, one under sail, the other under oars. After THREE PLUS HOURS of mixed no-action scenes and windy Ptolemaic narrative, we get to see the great harbor again. Both ships are still there. Neither has moved a cubit. This could be said to be symbolic of the whole movie. At what I thought was the end, Ptolemy advises the scribe who has been assiduously writing it all down to just throw all of the pages away. Would that the studio had done the same with the movie. The ONLY thing that could have made this turgid lump of celluloid enjoyable would have been to see it accompanied by Mike Nelson and the 'bots from MST3K. More than one person walked out before the film was over. I wonder if they wanted their money back also?