Stultifyingly Bad

Rating: 1/10 (25 November 2004)

I've already posted a lambasting of this travesty in the Oscar message board, which is somewhat (sic) of an irony. To all those who defend this rubbish heap of a film, I cannot fathom what you see in it. Stone may be impassioned with his subject matter, but he has no way of telling it in lucid dramatic terms, veering forward and backward in time like a drunken driver trying to navigate a stick shift for the first time. The only semblance of feeling in the film is engendered by the toned down love between Alexander and Hephaistion. Everything else is a narrative blur about Alexander's failed attempt to bring the East and West to some common ground of cultural harmony, and his frightful relationship with his mother and father, both played nonsensically by Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer, the former sporting a Russian spy/Jewish harpy accent and the latter a vague Irish brogue meant to duplicate (?) Colin Farrell's? But with a horrendous script that makes one titter with howlers like "women are more dangerous than men", no actor of any talent could escape infamy here. I suspect Stone hates women, reducing Rosario Dawson to a panting, painted vixen who can only stand on the sidelines while Farrell and Leto gaze longingly at each other. The film feels constantly off balance, interminable, and fails to create any empathy for its characters. Despite the panorama of the two battle scenes, they feel oddly detached, edited as madly as the rest of this colossal mess. Despite his penchant for excess, I expected much more from Oliver Stone, a roiling, accumulative emotional juggernaut that would make aesthetic caveats insignificant by the sheer weight of his visionary force. What we have here is a film that looks and feels like something fashioned by a committee of monkeys in the writing and editing rooms, a disaster of singular proportions. It not only makes "Gladiator" look even better than it really is, but it makes one long for the glory days of "Ben Hur" and "Spartacus" even more fervently, let alone the sublime majesty of "Lawrence of Arabia". Has it become that difficult to tell an epic story anymore? Apparently it has for Mr. Stone. The film wanders as aimlessly as it's hero does from Macedonia to Babylon to India in his (according to Stone) attempt to extricate his mother, Olympias, from his interior self as much as the geographical divide. The folly is in trying to tell the story of Alexander in a 3 hour film, because in attempting to cram as well as delete, Stone has reduced myth to a frantic and discordant stew of imagery, full of eye-popping sets and shouting matches between Alexander's increasingly weary and disenchanted comrades that adds up to nothing. Stone is like a crazed general leading his troops into a battle they can only lose. It's hard to believe this is the same man who made "Platoon" 18 years ago. It's as if his once bridled egomania, serving him at times brilliantly in the past, has now given way to unbridled desperation.