1) All ancient Greeks and Macedonians spoke with Irish accents.
2)Men in the throes of passionate movie love do not kiss or do anything remotely sexy. Instead they give each other simperingly rugged looks, awkward hugs, and tangle their fingers in each other's hair.
3)On the other hand, Black women pretending to be Persian just can't wait to get buck stark naked and have a fist fight/knife brawl/wrestling match on screen, whether or not they are in the throes of passionate movie love.
4)Alexander the Great was really Alexander the Great Suspicious Crybaby With A Bad Blond Wig And One Heck of An Oedipus Complex.
5)Oliver Stone is perfectly capable of making a movie filled with cliches, stereotypes, bad writing, over-acting, and pointless direction.
In General...
So once upon a time there was a king named Phillip(Val Kilmer) and a queen named Olympias(Angelina Jolie). Despite their obvious dislike of each other, they manage to have a son named Alexander(Colin Farrell). Ordinarily, Alexander would be the heir to the throne, but because Phillip is a bit of a schemer, that might not be the case. Olympias steps in with some scheming of her own, and in a confusingly non-linear sequence of scenes, Alexander grows up, surrounds himself with historic figures such as Ptolemy(played by both Anthony Hopkins and Elliot Cowan), falls in love with his boyhood friend Hephaestion(Jared Leto), goes to war, takes over a few million miles of world, marries a Persian(Rosario Dawson), becomes the ancient Macedonia version of Howard Hughes, and dies.
Or something like that. This is just what I caught in between naps...
The Good...
The cast is solid and often recognizable. Oliver Stone pays a lot of attention to detail as usual, and that makes some of the acting interesting(especially when watching different actors playing the same character at different ages.) Just about everyone featured in the movie can act well, and they all do the best with what they've got to work with.
The Bad...
It is not a good sign when a movie seems too long after the first fifteen minutes. Alexander is long, boring, historically inaccurate, and almost thoroughly unenjoyable.
There's too many cliches, too many awkward stereotypes, a lot of overacting and far too much dead space in what could have been a tightly plotted, exciting historical epic. Despite the gigantic bloody battles, all of the relationship geometry, sheer human drama and talent-studded cast, this movie is just not that interesting.
It's so uninteresting that even though I just saw it last night, I can't think of one scene that really stood out to me. The whole thing is just a blur of grainy color, pretentious speeches, and flying blood.
Also, considering that I don't really know anything about Alexander the Great or his time period, my claims of historical inaccuracy might be...well, inaccurate. But I have this funny feeling that at some point during his campaigns he actually visited Greece, not to mention Egypt. This movie makes it look as though young Alexander, completely freaked out by his mother, just kind of went roaring across Persian and into India for no good tactical reason. It's not as though there's a high standard for historical accuracy in films in the first place, but given how boring the script for this movie is, I find this an odd portrayal. Maybe showing the totality of Alexander's apparent military genius and tactical cunning would have made the movie much more interesting.
In Conclusion...
This movie is not really worth the time. I'd see something else if I were you.
Academy award winning director Oliver Stone presents a breathtaking new cut of his sweeping epic film, ALEXANDER, the true story of the world's greate...More at HotMovieSale.com
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