Good Performances; Spectacular FX; Lousy Script

Rating: Null/10 (4 December 2004)

Super special effects. Fine, fun, sword-'n-sandal-worthy performances.
If only someone besides Oliver Stone had written the script ...
I can't imagine what a world conqueror would look like, but Colin Farrell compels; he shows the necessary charisma, sex appeal, male bonding, arrogance, blood lust, in turns. In the scenes where he isn't very good, it's the script that fails him, rather than visa versa.
Farrell doesn't convey Alexander's vision, but the script never made clear what its Alexander's vision was, exactly. A fatal flaw in a script whose main narrative drive has got to come from a tedious slog from Macedonia through Persia to India in the days before hotels had hot or even cold running water.
Angelina Jolie, as Alexander's mother, gives a high camp performance that will live in film fandom for a long time to come, at least as long as Anne Baxter saying, "Moses, you splendid, adorable fool!" in "The Ten Commandments."
Jolie was an epic femme fatale. She could have eaten any number of film noir femme fatales for breakfast. Some critic said she gave a "nostril flaring" performance. Not true. I didn't catch one nostril flare. She really didn't have to flare her nostrils. Jolie fully inhabited this snake-wearing force of nature.
The Persian Boy is exactly what I would expect a Persian Eunuch love slave to look like.
The special-effects Ancient Babylon was spectacular. I would rewatch the movie just to see it again.
Rosario Dawson, as Alexander's wife, well...one can say one thing for sure. Dawson has amazingly large breasts. Bigger than her head. She swings them around. Not from a censorship point-of-view, but from an anatomical/aesthetic point-of-view, I was queasy. Can Dawson act? Does she need to? Not till they start to sag, and that could be any day now, unless she gets a carefully engineered brassiere.
The Battle of Gaugamela, an historic event at which Alexander defeated Darius, gave me everything I bought my ticket for. I felt as if I had a sweeping view of an important historic event from the ancient past -- and that's what I wanted to see.
I believed the acres of flat, yellow sand, the scythe-equipped Persian chariots that rendered the Greek troops mincemeat; I believed heavily-mascaraed Darius, standing and watching in his chariot; I believed Farrell, exhorting his troops, his eyes crazed with blood lust; I believed Farrell, gently helping one of his foot soldiers "let go of his body." I enjoyed the avatar of Zeus, an eagle, watching over everything as it swooped, repeatedly, over the plains.
During the better scenes, I was primed to expect something as good as "Lawrence of Arabia." The ingredients are all there. Flawed, world-whipping hero, gay sex, sand, vast vistas, costumes. The ironies of an empire that wants to "liberate" the eastern, barbarian peoples it kills and enslaves.
But the script really sucked. It just sucked. I don't know what else to say except to say that it sucked.
No narrative arch. No intelligence. No attempt to address the obvious ironies of a man loved by his men, whose very same comrades murder his wife and his child after he dies; a man who wants to "liberate" people while murdering and conquering them.
Heck, the old black and white classic, "Conquest," with Greta Garbo as Marie Walewska and Charles Boyer as Napoleon does a better job of addressing that same irony.
Was Alexander a monster or a superhuman? I can't say the script dropped that ball, cause the script never even picked it up.
Oh, what this movie could have been, with a better script.
Sigh.
I hope Colin Farrell wins from this. He was as good as Errol Flynn at his best. I went in with low expectations, cause he left me totally cold in "Minority Report." He won me over here in his very first scene.