Review of Alexander (1996) by Bruno L — 24 Mar 2011

For a big screen epic about Alexander The Great---Oliver Stone's Alexander is anything but. The battle scenes have the giddy, sinewy thrills that is typical of Stone, but it also carries Stone's annoying penchant for pompous grandiosity, and, something uncharacteristic of Stone, a tedious sense of timidity and caution. And it's three flippin' hours. Even Stone's lousiest film (Natural Born Killers, U Turn) have some sparks of energy that keep you watching, but there's barely a blip of that energy in this take of the Macedonian warrior who died young (at age 32).

What worse is he has Colin Farrell starring as Alexander, and while Farrell turns up the heat, despite the bottle blonde 'do, it's not enough to breathe real life into the tepid script. Farrell plays an Alexander beset by paranoia and conspiracies, and one filled with grand visions. Sounds a lot like Stone.

As for Alexander's alleged bisexuality--well that's barely touched upon. The film begins with Alexander's death in 323 B.C., with his arm swinging into the fram, revealing a ring that falls from his hand. It's Alexander's Rosebud if you will, the ring given to him by his comrade Hephaistion (Jared Leto), his childhood friend and lover. The most you would know of any of that though is from the looks the two exchange, nothing else.

It's very irritating since Alexander gets more truth and honesty from Hephaistion than he does women, particularly his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie) who gives her son all kinds of phallic snakes to play with as she plots to murder his one-eyed father, Philip (Val Kilmer, the film's only livewire). She tell Alexander that his real father is Zeus and loves it when a drunken god forces himself on her in front of her child.

Freud would have a field day, especially when Alexander ends up marrying Roxanne (Rosario Dawson) a Persian princess who looks an awful lot like mother, down to the snake bracelets. Things get even kinkier when Alexander recreates his father's rape scenario with Roxy, it being the only way he can get it up. Ugh.

That might explain why Alexander is much more at home with the boys. The battle scenes are where Stone really lets loose, from the battle of Gaugemala to the elephant attacks in India. But good luck trying to get inside the heads of any of the characters. What's more annoying is we get tepid narration from Anthony Hopkins as Gen, Ptolemy, who just goes on and on and on about the Great One's place in history. Alexander is all tell and no show, and a huge bore.