Alexander
2004
*
This is the longest review I have ever written. Consequently, I’ll write a short review for those who have no patience. In a dozen words or less:
It sucked. A lot. And I mean it really really really sucked.
AND NOW,
THE ACTUAL REVIEW
Co-writer/director Oliver Stone attempts to shine light on the famous conquerer (Colin Farrell), son of the Macedonian King Philip II (Val Kilmer) and Queen Olympias (Angelina Jolie), taught by the philosopher Aristotle (Christopher Plummer), in love with his best friend, Hephaistian (Jared Leto), but married to Roxanne (Rosario Dawson), who manages to conquer practically the entire known world by the age of 32, and then dies; all this is narrated by an ancient Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins). That 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. Mortal Kombat had better dialogue --- ah, heck, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation had better 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 occassions 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. He is never convincing and almost always wooden, although this has a lot to do with what he’s been given. However, there are a couple of brief moments when he is good --- on those handful of occassions when Stone lets him be flamboyant and crazy instead of a pathetic little girl. For the nine seconds or so when Farrell acts like Alexander should be, he’s great. So, with a good script, Farrell might have actually been a perfect Alexander, because the flamboyancy and “I am god” attitude could be wonderfully rendered by Farrell. However, with this script, he sucks.
As for the others, well… the usually brilliant Kilmer tries hard, and is really good when either a) his dialogue isn’t so awful he can’t find a single way of making it work, or b) he pointlessly attempts an Irish accent (which isn’t often). 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. I once did work on a short film that had a budget of about $700 altogether, and we had far more convincing old-age makeup.) 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.
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 with the Indians. The former is certainly big, with lots of impressive special effects, but has no 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 battle scene has some great moments and is almost brilliant, but misses the mark because a) in the middle of battle, halfway through a charge, and only a few dozen feet from the enemy line, as he is attempting to reinforce and save his flank, Alexander decides to stop and have a badly written “inspiring” speech at the worst possible time to throw one in, and b), 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 occassionally 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 in spite of the fact that they show every part of the lower male body that the MPAA will allow, which is distracting and annoying (and some other adjectives I won’t use); all of this recreats 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. The romance between Alexander and Haphestian is indescribably corny (and gross if you aren’t into the whole guy-on-guy thing, which I’m not); on the other hand, there are genuine sparks between Alexander and Roxanne, begging the question once again: why on earth did Stone make Alexander gay? On the upside, there were some decent technical achievements, some of the actors were good, 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, lose an inordinate amount of money (after that 155 million bucks, the film only made 34 mil in the
Stone, finally realizing after all this how much it all sucked, decided to make a “director’s cut” by cutting out 18 minutes and throwing in another 9.
That version sucks, too.
Let me wrap up by telling the films biggest failure: it never 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.
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