Alexander may have everything, but it leaves me cold.

Rating: Null/10 (17 November 2007)

Alex Sundered! by Doy Ariola
Days before I saw the movie, I was surprised to read American movie critics lambasting "Alexander". It was supposedly dull. Supposedly boring. Supposedly brain numbing. But my fascination with this movie project fueled me to watch it nonetheless.
When I did see the movie, I was even more surprised to see a huge turnout of people in the cineplex. Maybe because the audience had been preconditioned by the successes of "Lord of the Rings", "Troy" and "King Arthur". They were expecting the same grandeur and pomp. I must confess that I was expecting the same thing. But this time, we are getting something a little different. And I don't mean that as a compliment.
The movie starts off with Sir Anthony Hopkins bedecked in pre-civilization garb in what is now the lost city of Alexandria. He gives us a history lesson on how things had come about in reference to the main character.
This little preamble is okay with me for a few seconds but three minutes later, it sounds like I'm in high school again. I don't know about you but I'm partial to movies who open with a little showing than telling. The gabfest continues, interrupted by either a sex scene or a war scene, or both. After almost three hours of hanging on, my concentration is sorely tested. And I have to say that "Alexander" was truly dull. Truly boring. Truly brain numbing.
Oliver Stone's supposed labor of love has rendered his work to be a laborious bore! It has great production design, but doesn't stray too far from movies of its ilk. The acting is good enough and Farrell really tries to be Lawrence of Arabia in a skirt. But the script just seems to jampack biopic info in a chatty and unwieldy manner that it leaves you as cold as the wedding bed the characters slept in.
One of the main attractions of this movie is for Colin Farrel's character to go like Sir Laurence Olivier in "Spartacus" and prefer both oysters and snails. But before you start recounting the raunchy scenes in Caligula, you'd be disappointed to find nothing short of titillating in the movie. There isn't even anything sexually gratuitous! The nude scenes are sparing and almost prudish. But effective enough to convey the emotions and to propel the story along. Though there aren't anything short of pornography, Stone clearly shows Alexander's bisexual proclivities and how it affected his people.
And to the male audience, the hyped nudity of Rosario Dawson is a letdown. Though we get to see her ample mammary glands, I was disappointed to see our vivacious Rosario overwhelmed by the overblown plot. The movie bunched up on the historical details that we fail to see her character develop and give her that opportunity to show her acting chops.
When Stone likes his movie sexually discreet, he pulls no stops in the gore and violence. Expect "Braveheart" proportions of severed heads, impaled bodies and blood by the buckets. Stone never lets us forget that the we are in a war epic.
But the problem about the scenes is its rather chaotic nature. Yes, the fight scenes were admirable in grandeur but, for the life of me, couldn't understand what was happening or what the lead character was trying to do. The scenes look terribly static to me. Moreover, I do not see how Alexander's mind works when it comes to war tactics and how his strategy works best at that time. We only see scenes where Alexander uses his charisma to lead a people in conquering lands. I don't suppose it was all dumb luck.
When it comes to actors, the only real notable performance didn't come from Farrel but Angelina Jolie. In this movie, Jolie goes Machiavellian hundreds of years earlier as she tries to emote Sophia Loren's character in Benhur. She plays the unlikely mother of Alexander, who stops at nothing to keep her son politically aligned to kingship. Imagine her to be the Greek version of Morgana Le Fay as she schemes quietly in the background like a soap opera bitch, dabbling in augury. Jolie hams it up as she uses snakes as fashion accessories and lives it up in Versace-like squalor, complete with a Medusa head. Plagued with countless close-ups, I have a tendency to just stare at her bloated lips moving, almost disembodied, as they utter with a Mediterranean accent. But mind you, she wasn't convincing as Alexander's mother.
In the final analysis, "Alexander" lacks soul. When it should try to overcome the back story, the movie failed to evolve from to its quagmire of details. It's a shopping list of textbook details that bogs down from too much gabbing and not enough "moments". You'll find yourself cheated out of something that should have been great.