Go see it, the critics are wrong.

Rating: 10/10 (6 January 2005)

Having heard plenty of negative reviews about Oliver Stone's Alexander biopic, I was pleasantly surprised at just how good this movie truly is. Having grown up watching such classic war movies as Zulu, and Lawrence of Arabia, I was certainly impressed with the scale of Stone's movie. The battle scenes are truly epic and break with convention; there is a rawness to the battle of Guegemala depicting the inherent confusion that can occur when two armies clash on a dusty battlefield What many of the negative critics seem to focus on are the various interplays between the leading characters, whether it is the stunning Angelina Jolie who plays Alexander's mother Olympias or his male lover Hephaistion played by Jared Leto. What the critics seem to have missed is that Alexander was not a god but a flawed human, albeit a brilliant one at that. The relationship between Alexander and his generals is intriguing to say the least, that he may indeed have been poisoned by them in the end is not as far fetched as some critics seem to think.
Many of the negative critics (writers from some of the most right-wing newspapers in America such as the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post) find unpalatable is the thinly veiled dig at the Bush administration. This is dealt with in the parallel drawn by Alexander entering Babylon and Bush going to modern day Iraq. The right-wing press has never forgiven Stone for JFK and Nixon and they persist in calling him a 'conspiracy theorist'. Of course what seems to irritate them most is the fact that Colin Farrell speaks with an Irish accent, and not with an American drawl. The use of Irish actors and accents for the Macedonians is an interesting departure, although a little hard to stomach even for an Irish audience. What Stone is trying to do is to differentiate between the Macedonians and the Greeks; the Greeks are given English accents, this approach is quite realistic.It should not be forgotten that there was a fair amount of prejudice on the part of the Greeks to the Macedonians whom they considered bumpkins. What is very clever about this is the fact that the later day British Empire owed much of its military prowess to Irish Generals (such as Wellington) and soldiers.
Alexander has not done well in the US market, that is not to say that it won't do well elsewhere. Alexander I believe will sit more comfortably with European audiences more attuned to the subtle interplay of the characters. Alexander is a far superior film to Troy which was truly shocking. Let us hope that the studio bosses in Hollywood don't lose heart with Alexander's under performance at the box office and decide to pull future sword and sandals epics. As for the viewer, forget the negative comments and go see it.