Epic and boring.

Rating: 4/10 (20 September 2006)

I liked this movie for the nice costumes and settings. The battle scenes are nice as they give you the atmosphere of a big battle. On the other hand they are very long and you do not really understand (unlike e.g. in braveheart) what the strategy is that made one side win. Mostly you see slaughtering and leaders giving orders to attack this or that. What bores me and is that this movie clearly implies that Alexanders conquest of Persia is nothing different than the latest American military interventions in the Middle East. The language suggests it and most of the time you even forget that those are Greeks, so much is their point of view identical to an American perspective: The brave Greeks come to give the Persians freedom, the coward Persian King (=Osama bin Laden) flees into the Mountains from where he wages a "guerilla war" (a modern term employed by Aristotle in an anachronistic way). Beside a series of too long battle scenes you get an insight of Alexanders political alliances and his personal motivations. That is a bit more entertaining as it tries to give the characters some individual trait and tries to give a possible reason why Alexander the great went pushing on and conquering half of Asia. It also shows how his way of making the conquered provinces his allies guaranteed a certain stability to his empire. All in all you get some nice epic shots and lots of costumes, a portrait of Alexander that makes all a bit more entertaining without providing a very elaborated story or remarkable play-acting and Americans conquering the Middle East with swords and spears.
Another thing that I find funny is that many Greeks were upset when this movie came to the theaters because it portrayed their hero as a bisexual. Any historical research would have shown the homophobic protesters that deep friendships between men that could also tend towards homosexuality were common among their ancestors.