A towering failure

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2004)

Which is what Anthony Hopkins calls the end result of the ostensible historical Alexander's grand conquests, speaking for me and others in the audience as the movie ceased to string cliché after cliché after cliché together to make up interminable flat dialogue, delivered as if at an office coffee break, only Hopkins's rising out of the mundane into the presumptuously portentous. I waited for something decisive to occur, like maybe the cutting of the Gordian knot, but that wasn't scripted. Instead, I saw rebellions rise and fall like dormitory quarrels, odd leaps forward in time with awkward leaps backward too, and three or five interchangeable battles that consisted of blurred horses' flanks, hack and thrust, and weapons for show not use (pikes, much in evidence, are for foot soldiers to use to stop cavalry charges, the ends braced on the ground, not as seen elongated spears for waving in the air or throwing like javelins, fer goodness sake!). Even Vangelis music couldn't invest the flash-editing with excitement, because who could tell who won, and who cared). There IS one slomo shot of a horse rearing at a rearing elephant that's marvelously picturesque, almost worth half the price of admission, I must confess. But not the other half.
Then too, the film portrays confused sexuality apparently set against presumed Victorian family values -- that's Stone's confusion perhaps, since the actual participants of those days knew precisely the what and why of what they did with each other. A costume Machisti film surpassing "Cleopatra" in banality has at last been made, and without Elizabeth Taylor to help!