Great Movie for Intelligent Peoples and not for the American Viewers!

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2005)

Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography. It's boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson and chock-full of extravagantly brutal battle sequences. Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and -- to paraphrase our Ptolemy -- its failings are greater than most films' successes. As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie. Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours. Stone's films thrive on controversy and a lot of his films exist just because Stone wants to make people think and analyze the stories and tales they think they know about a subject. Every one of Stone's more high-profile and successful films have ignited a debate somewhere. This is also true about his Greek epic, "Alexander". The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy''. At least Stone's movie does not employ a hypocritical presentation of Alexander as Troy did trying to disguise the love between Patroclus and Aquiles as a cousin-cousin relationship. The Greeks of the 4th century BC apparently felt the same way as the real Alexander did concerning homosexuality, and Alexander was simply a product of his times in this regard, no more or less. That he was bisexual is incidental. Who he connected with, and why, is far more significant in the telling of his tale, and to my mind Stone did an excellent job of separating the important from the unimportant here. Of course, the on-screen violence was graphic, as befitted the violent nature of those times, and there was simply too much of it in Alexander's life to show it all, but I think Stone put a human face on a larger than life persona in an admirable way and successfully avoided many of the excesses a film of this magnitude would easily be prone to. "Alexander" is the height of artistic direction in my view.