Pretty good up through the first battle. Then leave and come back--maybe.

Rating: 2/10 (24 November 2004)

Alexander taming Bucephalus, then the effective use of the phalanx are great. As the phalanxes marched up and faced Darius, I found myself grinning and nodding. Particularly good sound. But after that, I spent a full two hours wishing this dude would just croak. This film was shot in only a year, and they seem to have left out the last month of editing. Many, many brushes around the gay theory, much screaming and arm-waving, but they kind of missed Egypt, Syria, the entire geopolitics of 332 BC. The first time Alex gets his guys cheering and thinking he's great in the whole second half of the movie is when he decides they can quit and go home. He's unlikable, but in a way that made me keep saying "so what?" If the story has a moral, it's "never attack an elephant on foot." Way, way too long for the points it makes, way too artifically dramatic, and I'd love to know how they figured out what kind of accent everyone should have--Angelina Jolie sounds like Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle.