Good work

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2006)

I liked this. I do think it needed a hard edit. But it's one of the only historical epics I've seen that wasn't teeming with errors, and the overarching story was great. Alexander became a god. He deified his horse. He was both well versed in the mythic traditions of his people, and in the hard, rational traditions. He was one of the greatest strategists ever. He changed what it meant to be a king. And this movie actually makes a nuanced exploration of these things. With some perky social commentary, which does a great job of showing power expressing itself in predictable tropes.
I loved the use of the cave paintings to give mythic exposition, and the use of flashbacks to them to tie the story to the myth as the movie unfolded. The use of Alexander's deified horse to represent his own shadow; the Hellenic Golden Boy who could integrate his own shadow.
There were some sour notes. The "freedom" thing was a distracting anachronism. Alexander was fighting for a lot of things: power, security, to best his father, to please his mother, to get away from his mother, to become a new Achilles, to bring a new organizing principle to the world . . . but not freedom as we mean it today. Colin Farrell spends entirely too much of the movie looking like he's wandered in from a re-make of Spinal Tap. And there was too much exposition, though it softened the blow that Anthony Hopkins was the one giving it.
I understand why the movie isn't widely loved. It's a very hard film. The family drama, the extremely graphic violence, the Oedipal undertones (overtones?), the explicit bisexuality, the sheer number of characters (I finally had to bring up Wikipedia to track them all), the non- linear story telling, the lack of a standard story arc, the disturbing parallels to the current situation in Central Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, all make it a hard movie to follow and sometimes even to watch. But it's quality film-making that completely blows Troy out of the water. Well worth watching.