Alexander the Sub-Par

Three hours. Three hours of over the top acting, melodramatic homosexual innuendo, and a hero who spent more time crying than he did accomplishing great deeds. Three hours of sitting in a darkened movie theatre wondering how anyone could have allowed Oliver Stone to make such an epic disaster. Three hours of thinking of all the other things I could have been doing with my time. But I spent those three hours watching “Alexander”.

It’s difficult to discuss this movie without resorting to extremes such as “the worst movie of the year” or “most horrible accent done by Angelina Jolie” or even “greatest misuse of Anthony Hopkins since ‘Instinct’”. However none of these statements properly convey the abysmal state of “Alexander”, Oliver Stone’s latest blockbuster indulgence.

Thankfully Stone has not called his movie “Alexander the Great” because the irony would have been too much to stand. His Alexander is not so much the great general and world conqueror that history has studied and worshipped, as much as he is a Momma’s boy who spends his entire life in a Freudian struggle to out do his father and escape the viperous grasp of his mother. Val Kilmer, fresh from his turn as a musical Moses, plays Phillip, Alexander’s one-eyed, lustful father. His wife and Alexander’s mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie channeling a cross between Bela Lugosi and Ninotchka) despises him and prefers the company of snakes and her young child to the rough manhandling of her husband. The two of them battle over the future and soul of their offspring. Stone spends a good portion of the beginning of the movie setting up this parental dichotomy, laying the ground for what he must have thought was deep insight into a man who eventually took over most of the known world. However, much like Rosebud, such things only give us part of the man.

Alexander grows up to be Colin Farrell in a hideous dye job. His coloring makes it hard to believe that at any point in his life he had a naturally blonde head of hair. Alexander spends his youth hearing how he will be King and spends his short adulthood trying desperately to life up to those expectations. He constantly pushes his army further and further than his father ever did, constantly answering to the criticism of his closest friends and advisors for doing just that. And through it all, he cries. He cries when he sees his hurt soldiers, he cries when he thinks about his mother, he cries when he has to say a final good bye to Hephastion his partner in approved man-man Greek love, he cries when he is questioned harshly by his friends, and he cries when he feels at his wits end. We may not be living in the days of emotionless Sparta but even during the heyday of the 90’s when all men were encouraged to get in touch with their feminine sides, no manly men cried as much as this epic hero. Everything else paled in comparison to ill-equipped Alexander seemed to be to take on the mantle of King from his murdered father. One wonders if he had truly been this sensitive if he would have made it as far as Babylon.

Throughout the movies there are long speeches which are next to impossible to follow. Poor Anthony Hopkins is given the sorry task of having to recite most of these speeches which even he cannot make remotely interesting. When Alexander takes a “barbarian” princess to wife, their subsequent mating scenes are more like scenes from Wild Kingdom than the erotically charged pieces Stone aimed for. The much trumpeted gay scenes involved little more than long desirous gazes between Alexander and various men. And in yet another heavy-handed visual metaphor, Alexander is followed throughout his journeys by an eagle, which is so omnipresent he is even featured in the credits. All this provokes more eye-rolling in disappointed disbelief than eye-rolling in wondrous amazement.

It took Stone many years to get this movie made. Sometimes there are reasons that scripts spend so long on the table…Stone might do well to put aside any of his conspiracy theories on such things and give that idea a good long thought before committing to another epic film