Is Hollywood ruled by talentless protégés these days?

Rating: 1/10 (21 September 2008)

I do not even know where to begin... Such is my deep disappointment with this movie. I suppose that every history buff shares this emotion, and not surprisingly the movie tanked at the box office.
The dialog is very simplistic, barely touching the level of complexity of the unfolding events. For example could you understand why he decided to execute Parmenion? Virtually none of the characters was really introduced, and so numerous of the palace and gathering scenes appear out of sequence, and it is not obvious what and whom they depict. Imagine you would open a 2000-page book randomly here and there, read from it, and try to make sense of such random fragments. This is how I felt while torturing myself through this malaise.
Aside of the unnerving style of jumps back and forth in the time line, the entire Persian campaign of Alexander was compressed to mere one battle with Darius. Not "Darayas," pronounce after me: Dar'yoos. Of course depiction of a battle itself is not an easy cinematic task, and here the makers of the movie showed their real deficits. They failed completely to explain what exactly happened at Gaugamela, and foremost, how it came to Gaugamela. Shaking cam substituted staged scenes with honest stunts, split second snippets were cut together into a visual blur without sense. Bombastic, too loud music, yelling with British/English accent completed this cinematic disaster.
The storyline misses completely the fact that Gaugamela was not the beginning of the struggle with Darius III. It was the climactic battle indeed, yet just one in a row of great battles with the Persians. The first meaningful battle was the one of the Granicus River, 334BC, in which he defeated Persian general Arsames, and so called Darius III himself to the scene.
Many famous events happened in between Granicus and Gaugamela. For example, at Gordium, Alexander untied the presumably unsolvable "Gordian Knot," he defeated Darius in the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, and later on, he commenced the famous siege of Tyre. This event marked the end of Phoenician independence and of over 1000 years of their culture and history as a nation. Do not look for even mentioning of any of these events in this so called "movie about Alexander." Do not look for the equally dramatic aftermath of Gaugamela either, foremost for his march on Persepolis and the (in)famous burning of Xerxes palaces and of the city. Do not hope to see his stay in Egypt and spiritual pilgrimage to the desert, the creation of the still existing city of Alexandria and of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which lasted to the equally famous Roman civic war and the death of Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius...
Shall I go on? Movie makers made of him a gay maniac, yelling and screaming, troubled man. In a sense he was troubled, a man of military genius, but lacking a political vision. A man who won everything, did not realized that and pushed his army to an epic, and yet senseless march toward India, caused a great deal of suffering and destruction. I never understood why do we call him The Great? As much as such opinion may vary, do not expect an answer from this movie. As I see it, Macedonians were only a footprint in history. Not long after Alexanders exploits, they were beaten every each time by Romans, and forced finally into becoming a Roman province. End of the game.
Hitchcock, please raise from the grave, show these young Hollywood crowds how to make a good suspense. They all lost their minds and their senses.