In 12 words or less: It sucked. A lot. And I mean it really, really, really sucked.

Rating: 2/10 (8 February 2006)

* The is a great story. Alexander's story is a truly stunning, epic, and powerful story. Unfortunately, Stone completely screws it up.
First, he makes the character of Alexander into a whiny, annoying, wussy, pathetic, unsure, and gay. Okay, there is no way on earth that the guy represented in the first five of that list was the guy who conquered the world. It's so completely and utterly unbelievable that you are never convinced or even interested by his character, just annoyed and bored. As for the last one, well --- it may or may not be true (there's no direct evidence that he was in real life, but no reason he wasn't), but it isn't interesting. I mean, seriously, so what? Who cares if he's gay? All Stone accomplished by emphasizing that was making a portion of the audience (including myself) uncomfortable.
Additionally, his writing absolutely sucks everywhere else. The dialogue is absolutely awful. I mean, seriously, I can't think of a movie offhand with worse dialogue. Not only is it either cringe-inducing, boring, or hilariously bad (and mostly just the first two), but it doesn't accomplish much. Character-wise, the tragic flaws of Alexander are incredibly over-explained, while his good parts are completely unexplained and, in fact, don't make sense at all.
And Stone's direction stinks. Every now and then he does a halfway decent job with the spectacle, but that's all he gets right. This is poorly filmed and either fake-looking or unenergetic, depending on the scene.
I don't know whether it was as a writer or director he made this decision, but whatever he was thinking, it was dead wrong: he decided to put the movie totally out of order, like Pulp Fiction or something. Now, when used for a reason, this is a good device. However, here, it seems like Stone just randomly cut it into pieces and threw them back together. This means that on those rare occasions when Stone actually pulls everything together and you start to get involved, suddenly you're thrown completely out as it flies to some other time and place, and it's all lost. The movie has no momentum because of this and Stone's inability to give it any path to follow, just throwing random scenes in, so you aren't awaiting anything or even interested, and it becomes completely and utterly boring.
The cast doesn't do much to help. Farrell is miscast, at least for what Stone does (and maybe for a good version of Alexander, but it's hard to say). He is never convincing and almost always wooden, although this has a lot to do with what he's been given.
As for the others, well the usually brilliant Kilmer tries hard, and is really good when either his dialogue isn't so awful he can't find a single way of making it work, or he pointlessly attempts an Irish accent. Jolie is incredibly over-the-top and absolutely ludicrus, with the corniest Russian accent in history. (Russian?!) However, it's over-the-top in a fun way, so it doesn't destroy the movie because it's actually halfway entertaining. (almost as entertaining as how incredibly fake her old-age makeup looks) Plummer is good, but barely in it. Leto is a good actor who does absolutely everything he can in one of the crappiest roles in film history. Basically, Stone tells him to look at Alexander longingly and um, other stuff like that. He tries, but his dialogue is the worst of the film. Dawson is awesome (and not just in the looks department), but after her first ten minutes or so of screen time, basically disappears and occasionally reappears as a background object, and is greatly missed when she's offscreen. And, finally, you have Anthony Hopkins, who does the most shocking thing he's done in his entire career: he actually manages to give a wooden performance. No other cast member is worth mentioning.
Even the battle scenes aren't so great. There are really only two, Guatema (the final showdown between the Greeks and Persians), and some battle in India. The former is certainly big, with lots of impressive special effects, but has no good buildup, and consequently no satisfaction or reason to care. It's also poorly filmed, with a pointless ultra-shaky camera and some very cheap looking shots. The latter has some great moments and is almost a brilliant battle scene, but misses the mark because after the cool slow-motion charge/elephant rearing/horse dying part, which really rocks, it shows everything through a very distracting red filter that makes it confusing when it should be dramatic.
The 155 million dollars they wasted on this mess occasionally did show up, though. The special effects were usually convincing, the sets were big albeit kind of silly at times, and the costumes looked kind of authentic; all of this recreates the ancient world spectacularly, albeit unconvincingly. Vangelis' score has some absolutely wonderful moments, but also falls prey to the general suckage most of the time. While romance between Alexander and Haphestian is indescribably corny, there are genuine sparks between Alexander and Roxanne, begging the question once again: why on earth did Stone make Alexander gay? Also on the upside, besides some decent technical achievements, a few moments were very good, and, to give Stone credit, he did take a very ambitious look at an ambitious topic. However, any movie this boring, pointless, meandering, poorly written, and badly directed deserves to be ridiculed by the critics and lose an inordinate amount of money.
Let me wrap up by telling the films biggest failure: it never adequately explains why Alexander wanted to conquer the world and then succeeded at conquering the world and why he's called Alexander the Great. If you can't even tell why a person got his nickname, you have failed at creating a good biopic.
The sad thing is, big, sweeping epics are my absolute favorite kind of film. Of all people, I should have really found lots of redeeming things.