Loading ...Movie Review - Alexander
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2004 / 173 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”- Hans Gruber, “Die Hard”
There is a potentially great film in the story of Alexander the Great. After all, he conquered most of the known world before his twenty-fifth birthday. That’s quite an achievement. (Needless to say at the age of twenty-five, I had accomplished far less. The only person I can think of with a similar achievement at a similar age was Steven Spielberg, who made “Jaws” at the age of twenty-five. It’s not quite conquering the world, but, well, it was “Jaws”.) So when I heard that Oliver Stone was bringing the legend of Alexander to the big screen, I was intrigued to say the least. This is Oliver Stone we’re talking about, after all, the director behind such great films as “Wall Street”, “JFK” and “Platoon” and the writer of “Scarface” and “Conan the Barbarian”.
But, alas, it was not that director that showed up to make “Alexander”. Instead it was the Oliver Stone that directed “U-Turn” and the more obnoxious moments of “Natural Born Killers”. “Alexander” is not a great film about a fascinating character. Instead, it is a boring, stilted, and messy film about a boring asshole. At the very beginning of the film, I could sense there was a problem. The first scene unfolded and came to an end and I still had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing. This is not good. Then the film jumped ahead forty years and Anthony Hopkins explained to the audience that they had, apparently, just witnessed (sort of) Alexander’s death. Now, right here, we have a problem. Movies that begin with the main character’s death and then cut back to show us how he got there are almost never good. In fact, I can only think of one movie where this actually worked: “Lawrence of Arabia”. Hell, even in that film showing the main character’s death right off the bat was pretty much unnecessary, but the movie worked anyway. So you know that you’re in trouble, because this movie sure as hell ain’t “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Then the film shows us Alexander as a child and you know once again that you are in trouble, because movies that begin with the main character as a child are invariably three hours long. As a child, Alexander does little of note (he tames a horse, there, that’s the most interesting scene from about forty minutes of this film) and then we cut to him as a 19 year old man (and it is here that Colin Farrell finally shows up). His father (Val Kilmer, one of the few actors who don’t embarrass themselves in this thing) and mother (Angelina Jolie, who never met a line she couldn’t drown in an overdone accent or wail at the top of her lungs) have differing opinions about how he should live his life and what his father is up to. His father knocks up another woman and Alexander begins to fear that this woman’s seed will end up on the throne of Macedonia (or Greece, whatever, the movie never really made this clear….shit, it could even be Persia) instead of him. There is a shouting contest at a social gathering and just when things begin to heat up and we think the movie is actually getting somewhere…the film jumps ahead forty years to Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins informs us that Alexander’s father was assassinated and that Alexander led his father’s army to conquer a bunch of countries before visiting an oracle in Egypt who tells him that he is the son of Zeus. Right there, I could tell this movie was a piece of shit. We spend the first hour of the film watching Alexander mope around, tame a horse and chat with his parents and then we are cheated out of seeing him conquer a bunch of countries and visit an oracle!!! This is bullshit!
Unfortunately, this is “Alexander” in a nutshell. The film treats us to scores of stupid, native dance numbers and enough overblown, stilted speeches to make you want to hack your ears off with a carving knife. But whenever anything legitimately interesting happens, it happens offscreen and Hopkins simply narrates it to us. Any time a potentially interesting scene could be shown, we are cheated out of seeing it. It’s almost as if Oliver Stone is just slapping the audience directly in the face at every step of the way. Eventually, we do get to see Alexander’s father get assassinated, but when the film shows it to us, it’s an hour and a half too late and, by this time, we no longer care. Sometimes messing with the flow of the narrative makes for an interesting film. I cite “Pulp Fiction” and “Memento” as perfect examples. But the movie must have a good reason for doing so. There is no point in telling “Alexander” out of order. Except, I suppose, to piss off every member of the audience. It’s sort of like having a drunk tell you a story at a bar and about three quarters of the way through he has to stop and backtrack and tell you something that he left out before he can proceed. That’s exactly what it felt like to watch “Alexander”. This didn’t have to be a movie, it could have just been an audio book about Alexander read by Anthony Hopkins and it would have had the same effect.
This is a terrible movie. The performances aren’t bad, but the dialogue is, so that when the actors invest a level of sincerity and devotion to these line readings, it’s basically all for naught. This movie is nothing but speeches, and the speeches are nothing but lame. They just go on and on and on and never arrive in the vicinity of a point. There are two battle scenes in this movie and both of them feel like tired retreads of scenes we’ve already watched. The first battle, in the desert, feels like a poor man’s version of the Battle of Sterling from “Braveheart”, complete with Alexander sitting on a horse in front of his men talking about freedom. And the second battle feels like a dull copy of the Battle of Minas Tirith from the final “Lord of the Rings” movie, complete with soldiers riding elephants. So if you’re itching to see the film because of its battle sequences, you can save yourself the trouble and just watch those two scenes from those two films instead. Trust me, you’ll be better off.
Another of the film’s myriad problems is that at no time did anything feel authentic. It’s nothing but hollow, Hollywood pageantry. I was never convinced I was being transported back to another era. Great movies can effortlessly give you that feeling. I always felt like I was watching a bunch of actors in front of a gaudy set. There is a love story in “Alexander” between Alex and one of his generals (played with an excess of eyeliner by Jared Leto). These two do have chemistry and it’s an interesting idea to show us a homosexual relationship within the confines of such an epic (it’s more interesting than the warmed-over battle scenes, anyway) but this relationship is torpedoed by cheesy declarations of love that would not seem out of place in a Harlequin romance novel. Finally, gay people have a movie with the sort of purple prose and self-serious facial expressions that mark really cheesy heterosexual love stories. I don’t think this is the sort of progress the gay people of the world are looking or asking for.
And yet another problem with the film is Alexander the Great himself. He’s the core of the film, the focal point, the axis on which this movie spins, and he’s just not interesting. He should be, for God’s sake. He’s possibly bisexual, he’s conquering the world and he’s fairly good looking. And yet the audience has no hook to hang their emotions on. There is a whole hour of so-called character development in which his character never gets developed. All we learn during this hour is that his parents hate each other, he likes wrestling with men (and losing) and he tames a horse. That’s it. But that’s not detail, that’s not emotion, that’s nothing we can ultimately care about. When the movie is named “Alexander” and Alexander is a bore, that’s a huge problem. He’s just a generic hero and we are given nothing to differentiate him from the thousands of epic heroes we’ve seen before (except that his lame story concerns a man instead of a woman).
Seriously, you can’t fathom how excruciatingly boring this film is. There is a lot of bluster and plenty of in-fighting among Alexander’s men but it all adds up to nothing. There is bizarre sexuality and elephant battles and even they cannot make this film provocative. Even the brief appearance of Rosario Dawson’s glorious breasts cannot keep this film from plunging the depths of mediocrity (though my eyes did stop glazing over for a couple of minutes when those sweet babies showed up). If you’re a fan of lavish sets, overblown acting, shouting, bad CGI shots of Babylon, and endless speechifying, then I cannot recommend “Alexander” too highly.
If, however, you are a fan of great filmmaking or interesting filmmaking or even coherent filmmaking, you might want to pass on this one.
