DVD REVIEW

Alexander Revisited - The Final Cut

Warner Home Video || Not Rated || Feb 27, 2007

SYNOPSIS

Like its title character, this reinvention by Oliver Stone of his epic story is bold and unprecedented, now recalling in its sweep such movie greats as Lawrence of Arabia, and Patton. The filmmaker of JFK and World Trade Center incorporates over 30 minutes never shown anywhere and reshapes his saga of the world’s greatest warrior (Colin Farrell) into a richer, more satisfying and audacious portrait from curious boyhood to mature conqueror. Added scenes of thunderous action and evocative sexuality enrich the performances of its stellar cast. Discover more secrets of a historic legend - and more greatness from one of cinema’s bravest directors.

CRITIQUE

“All men reach and fall, reach and fall.”  So says Ptolomy (Anthony Hopkins) at the beginning of the film, telling the story of Alexander as he saw it.  He is talking about Alexander, but he could just as easily be talking about Oliver Stone and his efforts in making this film.  Or perhaps it is the audience who fell; maybe we just weren’t ready.
 
“The East has a way of swallowing men’s dreams,” Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) tells his pupil, the young Alexander.  Dreams drive Alexander, his dreams of what the world could be.  Alexander is possessed by his dream, and he never stops believing, even when all the evidence says that he should just wake up.  He went on dreaming even when his comrades no longer believe, and The Dream is what brings him down in the end.

This new cut, the final cut, starts out with the Battle of Gaugamela, when Alexander’s dream and his reach was at its zenith. From that moment, he only had downward to go. Repositioning this scene not only opens the film on a higher, more exciting note, but it also folds the exposition into the action. The brief scene where Alexander describes his plans for the coming fight sets up not only Alexander’s character, but the characters of the men around him - Ptolomy, Cassander, Cleitus, Hephaistion - and how they relate to each other. If we watch this scene carefully, we can predict how they will behave throughout the film.

At the opening of the battle, when Alexander addresses his army, he talks about the man they are fighting, the Persian King Darius, and he also describes where he will end up. Alexander tells his army that they are fighting as Macedonian free men, and that Darius enslaves his men, forcing them to fight. By the time they reach India, they are slaves to Alexander and his dream, with Alexander himself the biggest slave of them all. Darius built an empire in Asia, which is exactly what Alexander was doing.
 
Alexander is also a father and son story.  Alexander’s father, Philip (Val Kilmer), had conquered Greece and united the city-states, and he planned the invasion of Persia before he was assassinated.  The two butt heads, but Philip is the proud father underneath.  After Alexander tames Bucephalus and wins himself a horse, Philip takes him to the cave where all the Greek myths are painted on the walls.  This is a rite of passage, a father teaching his son, but it is also a critical moment in the film, as everything on the walls of the cave comes true for Alexander in one way or another.  Philip also passes some sage wisdom to his son in regards to women.  “It’s never easy to escape our mother’s,” he tells his son, hinting that the two have more in common than either of them ever knows, and he adds, “they’re more dangerous than men.”
 
Alexander’s mother (Angelina Jolie) does what many mother’s do; she convinces her son that he is special.  Not just any son, but a son of Zeus.  Alexander has the kind of driving, overbearing mother that can take a lifetime to overcome.  Says Alexander at one point, “It’s a high ransom she charges for nine months lodging in the womb.”
 
Alexander does not overcome his mother so much as he marries her.  One of the great mysteries surrounding Alexander is why he chose to marry Roxanne (Rosario Dawson).  He had many concubines, and she could have been another, but he actually married her.  History has left the why of it up to speculation, and Stone wisely does the same, but there are some striking similarities between Roxanne and Olympias, not the least of which being that neither woman is Macedonian, so any son Alexander would have had with her would have been looked at as he was, as second best to any son he might have had with a Macedonian wife.  Alexander becomes more like his father as the film progresses. 
 
Alexander won the battle of Gaugamela with his father’s army.  Philip had perfected the Greek phalanx and turned it into a lethal, unstoppable killing machine.  Alexander was the tactician, though, and he thwarted an army that vastly outnumbered him.  Gaugamela is one of the most famous battles in history, and a complicated one, a chess match of infantry maneuvers.  Stone captures it perfectly, showing both sides of the action and telling the story in a dynamically visual way, so that we know exactly what is going on without a lot of dialogue. (To make this even more timely, the battlefield at Gaugamela is just east of what is now Mosul, Iraq. Empire building, the reaching and falling, never ends.)
 
This is Alexander at his peak, and we see this in the way the battle is fought, and in the way it is shot.  The battle is bloody, but not excessively so, and much of the action is seen from a bird’s eye view.  We have two conventional armies going head to head, using conventional fighting techniques.  The chaos of battle is there, but at the core it is relatively straight forward, as opposed to what would come later.
 
Alexander wins the battle, of course, and he wins an empire.  He rides into Babylon a hero, welcomes by an adoring crowd.  The lush colors of his entrance signal that he is at his peak; it will never be this good again.  When Alexander sees his new palace, he flops down on a bed we have seen once before, in the very first scene of the film. At the height of his power and glory, when the world was at his feet, Alexander lays down on what will be his deathbed. Most would have stopped at Persia, but Alexander had hubris, big dreams and big balls, and he was never content.  He chases Darius, continuing east after finding him dead, murdered by his own men.  Alexander continues east, creating new Alexandrias and destroying any tribes that resisted him, until he leads 150,000 people across the Hindu Kush and into India and Afghanistan.  He brings his mobile empire farther than his father ever imagined, farther than their myths ever told them was possible.
 
And that is where everything begins to crumble.  Alexander is obsessed, possessed, and his men have come too far, been away from home too long, fought too many battles and lost too many men.  They do not believe in his dream, and they are starting to love a little less.
 
Alexander is not a linear film, much to Stone’s credit.  After Gaugamela, we flash back to Greece, to Alexander’s boyhood. So much happened in Greece to shape Alexander that to have it all at the beginning of the film would put so much weight on the first act or two that the viewer would have no energy for the rest of the film.  Going back and forth the way we do, having Alexander reflect on the events of his early life, gives the events a resonance they would not have had otherwise.  Scenes are cut, rearranged, and the way Stone has pieced them together is genius.  Each flashback not only comments on what is happening in the present, but foreshadows what is to come.  This is especially so later in the film, and the effect is remarkable. 
 
When Cleitus confronts Alexander in front of a party, questioning his leadership and decisions, this is a repeat of the scene where Alexander confronts Philip, only now Alexander is Philip, the leader who has conquered too much and gone off course; Alexander is not drunk on wine but on power and ambition.  Cleitus is also Philip, chiding an insolent boy who can’t get it right.  Killing Cleitus is killing his father, and by extension he is also killing himself.
 
As they move farther east, into strange lands, monsoon conditions and terrain they were unfamiliar with, with no end in sight, the situation becomes more tenuous.  Alexander puts down a mutiny by slaughtering all who rose against him.
 
The jungle battle in India is still the operatic peak of the film. This one sequence may be single most intense, emotionally highest pitched piece of film Stone has ever shot. It is the most intensely passionate moment in the film, and the one that has the clearest thumbprint from Stone. The elephant battle is the high point of the film, the highest operatic note to which the film has been building.  The final battle - only the second battle scene in the film - is actually a combination of two battles that took place in India, battles so complicated in their execution that Stone himself said that he would never have attempted to put them on film.  As it is, the final battle is a masterpiece in itself, brilliant filmmaking.  It was the bloodiest battle Alexander ever fought.
 
The money shot of the film is found here, where Alexander, on horseback, goes head to head with an Indian fighter on an elephant.  The shot itself is amazing, as both go up together, and the horse continues for one step... two steps... three steps.  The elephant is Asia, and Alexander has finally run into something larger than himself, and he can go no farther. He made it to Asia, only to find out that the world did not end; it just kept going, and going, and going. Alexander has hit the wall. Alexander is insane with the rage of battle yet incapable of advancing another inch.  The switch to infrared film here heightens the surreal and intense tone of the scene. He falls: literally, off his horse when he is struck by an arrow, and metaphorically, as what follows is his long, disastrous journey back to Babylon and his early demise.  The wave of his dream breaks and rolls back.
 
In the cave Philip tells Alexander of the Titans, whom the gods were supposed to protect them against.  Philip was afraid of the Titans, but Alexander embraces them, becomes one of them.  Before leaving India he plants a monument and proclaims that all who look upon it will know, “Titans were here.”
 
Alexander never stopped dreaming.  Once in Babylon, with Hephaistion (Jaret Leto) on his death bed, Alexander, presumably to give his lifelong friend an idea to live for, lays out his plan to “launch a thousand ships,” conquer Rome and unite Europe and Asia.  Hephaistion dies, and the men left around Alexander no longer share his dream.  They want to go home.  The last image of Alexander, wearing the lion’s head, is the perfect image on which to send him out.  Alexander was a lion, and this lion drinks his death fearlessly.  There is a moment where he is handed the final chalice and he looks around the room at his men.  A toast has been proposed, but Alexander is the only one raising his glass, and the rest of them wait for him to drink.  He at least suspects, but he truly has no fear.  Alexander dies like he lived: reaching.
 
Much of the criticism leveled against this film was simply unfair.  What seemed to get mentioned more than anything else was Alexander’s homosexuality (“Alexander the Gay”).  It was distracting, some said.  That says more about the viewer than the film.  Aside from the fact that it is historically accurate, the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion (and others) is written deftly into the film.  The worst that can be said is that perhaps too little is made of Alexander’s sexuality.
 
The theatrical cut was derided for being three hours long, which isn’t a crime in itself, but the pacing was the film’s weakest point.  What was three hours long felt like much more, even in the film’s more riveting moments.  The Director’s Cut improved on that somewhat, but the pacing was still an issue. The final cut has ironed out all those wrinkles. At three-and-a-half hours long, this is the longest cut, but is also the tightest. I noticed the film’s length here less than than I did in the other two cuts.

With Alexander Revisited, Stone has created the definitive version of his film. Everything is in the right order, and all the imperfections have been worked out. Looking at this, one can only wonder why it was not released this way to begin with. If it had, this film might have escaped some of the unfounded criticism it received.

Or maybe not. Greatness is sometimes the easiest thing to attack.
 
Ptolomy hints that he and the rest of Alexander’s inner circle poisoned Alexander, just so they would not have to go on the way they were, but he then tells the scribe to change the cause of death to fever.  Ironically, all the first hand records from the time of Alexander - and those of Ptolomy, for that matter - have been lost to time.
 
Ptolomy remains in awe of his former king.  “His failures towered over other men’s successes,” he says.  He is talking about Alexander, but with this film he could easily say the same thing about Oliver Stone.