What a yawner

Rating: 1/10 (26 September 2005)

** Since I didn't finish watching this movie, there aren't any spoilers in this review! ** It's a rare thing for me to not finish watching a movie, even a bad one. However, this movie was so boring that, after an hour of enduring this talk fest, I just couldn't see waisting another precious minute of my life on watching it. Being historically accurate doesn't mean you have to be so stilted in your acting and directing that the movie becomes a painful drudgery just to sit through to the bloody end. Besides, the movie wasn't THAT accurate, anyway.
Half way into this movie, I realized that I had absolutely NO empathy for Alexander, or for any other character for that matter. The scenes, while rich in costumes and trappings, were devoid of anything that would've made me want to care what happened to Alexander. Even the battle scenes, which have been inexplicably lauded by many here, were actually quite ineffective, as well as inaccurate.
For example, the defeat of Darius was the climax of Alexander's life. The Greek defeat of the Persian forces in the mountains above the Plain of Issus stands as one of history's greatest victories by a vastly outnumbered army. It did NOT play out at all in the manner that was portrayed in the movie. For one, it took place in a mountain valley, after both armies had realized that they had actually marched PAST each other. Alexander had the great luck to discover this fact before Darius did, and managed to trap Darius's army in just the right place (a narrow mountain valley). Thus, the size of Darius' army, which would've been a huge advantage in the sort of battle depicted in the movie, actually turned into a major disadvantage that Alexander used very effectively.
This battle should've been the movie's climax, and should've taken a good two-thirds (or more) of the movie to set up. As it was, the crowning point in Alexander's life was relegated to a footnote, and was over in the first thirty minutes of the movie. After that, it was all downhill for this horrible movie.
For an example of the CORRECT way to tell the story of a General-King, try Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Shakespeare's Henry V. Henry V revolves around one of history's other unlikely victories, that of the defeat of the French by the vastly outnumbered British in the Battle of Agincourt.