An Epic Waste of Film

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2005)

Oliver Stone seems to have had a dilemma in telling the story of the life of Alexander the Great: Make it historically accurate or insult the audiences' intelligence. He opts for the latter. If I had had no prior knowledge of the life of Alexander, I might have been mildly entertained. What Stone opts to do is to gloss over, or completely eschew almost all of the important, historical military achievements of Alexander in favor of an fictional, ham-handed back story emphasizing his ambitious mother. Stone has a way of beating a point into the ground and he does that here. Angelina Jolie is horrific in this role (everyone else who is supposed to be Greek speaks with a British accent, except for her, who fails at a terrible Greek approximation plus she can't be that much older than Colin Farell to make the mother/son relationship remotely believable). I had to fight back the urge to jump through the screen and choke the living daylights out of her she's so abominable in this role. Otherwise, Stone apparently thought it would be too much for American viewers if Alex was both a great military commander and a homosexual, so he made him a homosexual who, incidentally, commands an army. There are two battles scenes in a movie about a man who spent his entire adult life conquering all the known land east of the Aegean. The acting is uninspired and actually angered me. This is an epic stinker in the vein of Ben Hur and Moses. Only having Charlton Heston in this movie could have made it worse. This movie was simply egregious.