The Anti-Patton

Epics are everywhere.  Set your movie in olden times (we’ve seen Scottish, Roman, and Greek variations of this already, just to name a few), do up some huge battle scenes, and extend the film to three hours or so, and voila, you have an epic.

Alexander breaks new ground in being the first epic soap opera.

That’s not completely fair; there is probably far too much self-important speechifying in Alexander to have it qualify as a soap opera.  Then again, the amount of time spent on battles and conquest is small compared to that spent on how much Alexander (Collin Farrell, S.W.A.T., Phone Booth) and his male lover Hephaistion (Jared Leto, Panic Room, Requiem for a Dream) can furrow their brows before they cry.

Director Oliver Stone (Any Given Sunday, The People vs. Larry Flynt) makes a sizeable misstep in this biopic of Alexander the Great by talking about too much and showing us too little.  Alexander’s mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie, Sky Captain, A Shark Tale) hates his father Philip (Val Kilmer, Spartan, The Salton Sea), and Alexander is often caught in the middle.  Olympias’ scheming, almost incestuous relationship with her son is more of a focus than Alexander’s grand schemes of empire or certainly of his background as a conqueror-in-the-making.  Kilmer mostly staggers around drunk and gives no indication of how he might have come to power in the first place, and I can’t help but think that as a military leader born from a powerful father, wouldn’t Alexander’s relationship with Philip have been a bit more important?

Who knows.  In any case, Stone wants to paint an altogether different portrait of Alexander, one that focuses on his inner conflicts and his dreams.  The result is a film that plays out like a soft and fuzzy version of Patton, where instead of a gruff and abrasive general who wants men to fight for him, not to love him, we see one who conquers people so that even more will flock to his cities and fawn over his name.  We see Alexander lay out a longshot plan of attack against the armies of Persia, and we see him ride out with his cavalry, but we don’t see what made him a great general.  Ambition might explain the extent his empire reached, but not how he managed to never lose a battle.  We also hear an aging Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins, The Human Stain, Red Dragon) talk about Alexander’s brutal treatment of some of the lands he conquered, but the director is careful never to show us any cases where his beloved, dreaming protagonist did wrong to those he conquered.  Those are the “exceptions,” he says, after rattling off about half a dozen of them.

The main problem with Alexander is not that it deals with bisexuality, as seems to be very popular to talk about in the absence of any substantial discussion.  In fact, it seems very strange indeed that anyone can see a movie about an ancient Macedonian and then be shocked that he’s portrayed as having had sex with another man.  Alexander’s difficulty is that it isn’t very exciting, or even particularly interesting or insightful.  Old Ptolemy’s lecture on dreamers at the end of the film isn’t nearly deep enough to warrant the wait, and by then we’re left wondering if the point of this movie was really to show us Alexander the Great, or if it was just to show off.

Film Rating: ê1/2  (out of 5)