***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Brian Blessed, and Anthony Hopkins
Directed by Oliver Stone & written by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle, and Laeta Kalogridis
2004
173 min R
If loving Oliver Stone is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Yes, there’s a lot about his new film “Alexander” that doesn’t work. But there is so much right about it, and if it is a failure, it is at least a brave, daring, ambitious, and spectacular failure. At a time when big budgets often mean small ideas, Stone has thrown his heart and his brain, and not just money and silicon, at this project. To call “Alexander” the worst movie of the year is to reward cowardice. Stone’s film features stunning images and symbols, two superb and exhausting battle sequences, and the year’s best camerawork. It is beautiful to look at. As befits its title character, a man who had almost everything but kept losing it by a few feet, it’s worth watching “Alexander” falter and even crash just to share in those moments of impossible soaring. Both Alexander and Oliver have shaken their fists at heaven and the gods have laid them low. But these are the defeats that a man can be proud of.
First of all, what “Alexander” does so very, very right: the battles, one between the Macedonians and the Persians, the other between Alexander’s mixed army and the Indians. Both sequences achieve the highest, dizziest glory of movie violence: through a mixture of awe and disgust, we are challenged to look into the dankest pit of the human soul. As I witnessed thousands and thousands of men hacking each other to pieces—swords, spears, knives, chariot wheels, even a severed head being used at one point as a weapon—and the sand turned to blood, my eyes got wet and I thought man truly is the vilest, most repulsive creature to ever walk the earth. Soldiers end the conflicts drenched in blood, from head to toe, and we follow the young conqueror into the vast fields of the wounded, something that Peter Jackson was too big of a pussy to show us in “Lord of the Rings.” Yet, even amidst such ghastliness, I found myself admiring the mechanical genius that made the weapons, the athletic prowess that decides the victor, and the creativity and intuition that summons the tactics. Such is the ambivalence at the core of our being, and the bloodshed in “Alexander”—like the helicopter battle in “Apocalypse Now”—illustrates that.
The first battle is a stunning mixture of cinematography, effects, camerawork, and vast numbers of trained soldiers. Director of photography Rodrigo Prieto turns the bloodshed into an enormous canvas of dustclouds pierced by blinding blades of sunlight. We fly alongside Alexander’s pounding steed, then move in front of him within the same shot; we coast from one army to another on the wings of an eagle; we follow cavalry until we are enveloped by clouds of sand kicked up by the horses. Conceptually stunning is that Stone doesn’t just ram us into a hacking, sword-swinging melee but actually gives us a sense of the tactics involved. Titles such as “Macedonian Left” and “Macedonian Center” are helpful, and the sequence in which Alexander’s cavalry outruns the Persian cavalry, leads its horsemen astray, then encircles them beneath a cloud of dust is masterful. The battle between the conqueror and the Indians employs a photographic technique that would seem absurd if I revealed it now, but fits perfectly within the course of the movie. The result is that Alexander and his men seem to be slicing and dismembering Indians in the very lowest pit of hell itself…and that’s when the elephants come out of the trees.
Thematically, Stone plays “Alexander” like a sword-and-sandal “Citizen Kane:” both Charlie Kane and Alexander the Great see the conquest and the control of others as the only way to feel love and bring happiness to the world. Both hide their desire for control under well-meaning patriarchy: Kane hopes to “give” the underdog a fair shake against industrial tyrants, while A-the-G hopes to bring Greek and Macedonian liberties to the serfs of the East. There is perhaps no illusion more alluring than becoming the pure-hearted and just tyrant. Unlike every conqueror in his wake, Alexander does not wish to wipe out all “inferior” cultures and replace them with his own; he longs to join all the cultures together, intermingled and intermarried, to wipe out all differences and all the crap that goes with them. To this end, he and his army of skirt-wearing badasses set out to conquer Persia and pretty much everything that pops up after it.
By the time of his death, under a Persian flag, he is no longer a Macedonian, but a citizen of the world, or at least his vision of it. Imagine if Great Britain, instead of making India a colony, had introduced India and the Indians into the United Kingdom as equal partners with England, Wales, and Scotland, and you’ll get an idea of Alexander’s vision. His subordinates do not share his ambition, partly because of bigotry, tribalism, and greed, but partly because they see through the illusion of the just and kindly dictator. We are, of course, living with the fruits of this man’s labors to this day, and Stone’s goal is to dissect these 2,300-year-old seeds.
“Alexander” is partly undone by its uncertainty of how to treat the great man. It succeeds when it takes the approach of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Citizen Kane,” in which the man at the center of the storm is a question mark. Stone makes it clear that we are not seeing Mr. The Great (Irish actor Colin Farrell) himself, but a version of him as remembered by one of his successors, now an old man and ruler of Egypt (Welshman Sir Anthony Hopkins). The old man admits again and again, “I did not know him, I knew only what I imagined and what I wanted to know about him.” Many of the movie’s best images, involving eagles, horses, and sepulchral cave paintings, come from Alexander confronting the discrepancies between men and the myths about them at various stages in his life.
Page two of "Alexander" (2004). Back to home.