not the best historical epic

Rating: 5/10 (12 October 2005)

It is hard to understand Oliver Stone's choices. The gifted director who made probably one of the best Vietnam war movies, the intriguing director of 'The Hand' and 'Natural Born Killers', even the programmatic director of 'JFK', and now this? 'Alexander' looks too much like a big studios historical epics of the 60s, but this is no 60s any longer, and without daring to say loudly what is different 'Alexander' fails on almost any plan.
There are certainly a few different ideas in the script. One of them is a modern interpretation of the story of Alexander, with some contemporary implications. This part fails, mostly because it does not find any credible translation in cinema language. Being left with commentaries about 'guerilla war' in the mouth of 4th century BC characters cannot make a credible case. Another theme is about the ambiguous sexual orientation of Alexander. As legends whistle the story for milennia, as books throw the rumors of his homo-sexuality to footnotes, so does Stone, probably as result of Hollywood puritan politics, and here is the source of another failure. What we are left is with an inversion of focus, with Alexander's mother becoming sort of central or at least driving character in his life's story, and here we must give credit to Angelina Jolie for succeeding to play a powerful and dominant mother role, with the exception of the funny accent which only Stone and her hold the secret (maybe).
There is too little good cinema in this film, and too much off-screen commentary and theater dialogs. Only for a few moments like in the flash-back re-creating Alexander's father assassination are we reminded what a fine director Stone was and maybe will be. 'Alexander' however, will be missing from the list of his best movies.