Scathing political commentary that almost drowns in a welter of gore

Rating: Null/10 (27 November 2004)

Alexander: 1) becomes King because Daddy was King before him. 2) Is immature, callow, self-absorbed, none too bright. 3) Is mentally and morally unequal to the absolute power he wields. 4)Believes he rules by divine right, and is destined by the gods to conquer the world and bring Hellenic "civilization" and "freedom" to the huddled masses elsewhere, grovelling under dictatorships. 5) Irrationally believes that the way to bring "freedom" to them is to march his troops and heavy armaments in to their cities, butchering all who resist. 6) Is indifferent to the environment as he imagines marching over the globe, "developing" it into a series of cities, reconstructing the natural environment for convenience of transport to Hellenic commerce. 7)Is obsessed with proving he is better than Daddy, and can be a bigger Conqueror than Daddy, who never established a base in the mideast in Babylon (Babylon is in modern day Iraq), which Alexander insisted on doing.
Substitute "George W. Bush" for Alexander in the above statements, and the trajectory of the plot's human actions and inner motives light up as a political commentary on our own times and unhappy helplessness under a destructive, none-too-bright, megalomaniac president. Unfortunately, the political references are submerged by the film's other main goal, which is to create as historically accurate an image of Alexander and Hellenic civilization as possible.
This accuracy means showing homosexuality as just something that most Greek men engaged in casually, without making it an "identity," without foregoing sexual interest in women also, and without its being anything controversial. It also means showing the vast scope of suffering and death that Alexander inflicted, which takes not only huge and bloody battle scenes but 2 1/2 numbing hours of repetition of said violence, which nearly induces mental and moral shutdown in the viewer by overload. And because homosexuality in our time has a controversial quality that it lacked in Alexander's, this aspect tends to grab the viewer's attention away from the political one.
I wish I could say I liked this movie, but the excesses were too excessive, and there is a clumsiness in the way the movie is put together whose details elude me, although I think all viewers feel it. Does Oliver Stone have enough film to recut this shapeless blob into a sharper film, whose political commentary consciously comes through? I hope so, and will look forward to a later director's cut.