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Warner Bros./Intermedia, 2004
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Directed by Oliver Stone Written by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis Produced by Moritz Borman, Jon Kilik, Thomas Schühly and Iain Smith Music by Vangelis Cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto Edited by Tom Nordberg, Yann Hervé and Alex Marquez Production Design by Jan Roelfs Costumes by Jenny Beavan Cast |
So how did it end up such a Zeus-awful mess? Why did it turn into the biggest money loser of 2004? Had the Greek goddess Hera cursed the film because she knew that Alexander really was the son of her philandering husband Zeus and didn’t want any film featuring him to become a hit? That’s the only reason I can come up with to explain the failure of Alexander, a film of gorgeous visual promise and utterly flat dramatics. A film that wanders from scene to scene, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…except a huge net loss for Warner Bros. in the fourth quarter of 2004.
Alexander isn’t boring, nor is it an unwatchable trainwreck like Batman and Robin or Battlefield Earth. It has a few points of interest and some sumptuous exotic settings. The visualization of the city of Babylon is breathtaking, and the Hellenistic production design will make any history lover catch his or her breath. But ultimately, Oliver Stone’s Alexander fails to knit itself into a coherent piece. It tells the audience nothing about Alexander or the people around him except that they lived awash beautiful scenery and glowing photography.
A figure like Alexander cries out for an deep and well considered explication. The son of Phillip of Macedon, the king who conquered Greece and planned to take down the hated Persian Empire of the Achaemenids, Alexander followed his father’s plan and carved out an empire that stretched from Macedon and Egypt in the west to the northern marches of India in the east—all before he turned thirty-three and died from living too much. It seems a wonder that one man could achieve such feats in so brief a time and leave a legacy that reshaped the world, and at the opening of Alexander, wonder is what you have: How will this huger-than-history conqueror appear on the screen? What will find out about him? What power lay behind his success?
Apparently, it was the power of yelling a lot. Every other scene in the movie is a throat-rending shouting match, usually about a dramatic point the script forgot to make clear, or only makes clear later through its clumsy nonlinear structure. It sometimes feels as each scene had a different writer, and none of them bothered to communicate with each other. Did the actors ever speak up during filming to ask Oliver Stone what their lines actually meant? What their characters were arguing about? Maybe Stone just waved his hands and said, “Trust me, if you yell a bunch, people will think you’re saying something important.”
Most of the bellowing naturally falls to star Colin Farell, who struts through the film with his mouth constantly wide open, either in a shout or in a slack-jaw “huh?” expression. Farrell has the boyish looks and enthusiasm for the part, but gives only a superficial look into the man. His relationships with his two important lovers, Hephaistion (Jared Leto) and Roxane (Roasario Dawson), seem to exist cut loose from the rest of the movie. Alexander shares moments with them (and rough sex with Roxane), but just like the script they seem adrift and cut-off from everything around them. The bisexuality of Alexander was a major talking point about the film before its release, but it proves inconsequential on screen.
Stone places most of his dramatic emphasis on a strange Oedipal drama between Alexander, his loutish warrior father Phillip (Val Kilmer, mostly buried under beard and scar make-up), and his scheming mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie, who’s only one year older than Farrell, which really makes their scenes together extremely bizarre). The competition between the three unspools throughout the film, intercut with Alexander’s long slog across Asia with his complaining generals, and again the interwoven structure of the film hurts it. The Olympias-Alexander-Phillip dynamic should come before the world conquering in order to put Alxander’s decisions in context. Done intermittently, it’s an unfortunate case of slamming the barn doors after the war chargers have left.
And what’s up with the accents? I never knew Macedonia was so Irish!
Alexander does at least promise brutal military action—this is the tale of a man who conquered the known world, after all—but it falls short in this department as well.The two major battles, spaced far apart and falling a half-hour each from the movie’s endpoints, are so disorganized that they simply cause confusion. The Battle of Guagamela—one of world history’s key confrontations—dissolves into a sea of dust and aerial shots that make not a bit of sense. Even though the Persians and Macedonians wear easily distinguishable armor, Stone and his editors manage to make them almost impossible to tell apart. The inclusion of on-screen titles (MACEDONIAN LEFT, MACEDONIAN CENTER) seems like a last desperate attempt to make the fight comprehensible. The later battle, a nameless fracas in India, has tons of blood and charging elephants and an overindulgence in weird color tints, but no more drama or context. The music from Vangelis in these fight sequences, mostly a soaring but undynamic droning, doesn’t help the situation.
As the movie comes to a close, narrator Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), tries to bring some sort of closure to Alexander’s life while also imbuing him with a mythic quality . At least, I think that’s what he was trying to do. It sounds more like senile mutterings. And so the film, after three hours of blood and shouting and title cards and more shouting finally sputters to an end. Alexander returns to the history books to pose a tantalizing mystery, and I shake my head and again wonder how all this talent, time, and money ended up in such a quagmire. Stone should have pulled out the troops and sent them home the moment he suspected that he had no clear idea what he was trying to say.