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Oh Alexander
what am I going to do with you? You are such an awful movie. And yet you are so ambitiously bad that a part of me likes you for it.
So awash you are in your awfulness and so unaware of it. Like footprints
at the edge of the shore how you go on for what seems like eternity and then in a moment all is washed away with the tide. Here I stand once again alone on the shore, looking out into the distance and wondering
to myself, “What the fuck did I just watch? Did I just sit for three hours
for that? Did I really see Angelina Jolie on her hands and knees screaming about
her womb? What the hell was that? Oh
my God I’m never getting that time back am I? It’s gone forever.”
It’s unfair to judge this movie as
a historical epic, it fails so soundly, there is no point in whining about how ham handedly Oliver Stone bungled the legend
of Alexander the Great. So I’m not going to point out how completely off
the historical mark this movie is because most people can’t remember anything of any significance from history anyway. Ok, just one… I am getting really fed up with this revisionist history where
all historical epics have to have their heroes spouting some multicultural pap and trying to unite foreign lands in some sort
of “I’d like to teach the world to sing” moment (I’m looking at you Kingdom of Heaven). Can’t we just all agree that throughout history there have been some great men who also did some
horrible things? Alexander slaughtered thousands, burned cities to the ground,
he was a conqueror, he conquered people, he took their stuff, he might have kicked a bunny at some point, but he also accomplished
amazing things in his short life. Is it asking too much to have a real person
portrayed as such? It’s because of this I am not treating this as a serious
biography of Alexander’s life. I am judging this film as though it were
any other, I’m not going to get all pissed off like I did with League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In fact the utter crapitude of this film has charmed me in a way few bad movies can. It’s filled with embarrassing performances and several great laugh out loud moments. For your information, I am reviewing the DVD version which I hear is actually better than the theatrical version,
though I can only imagine how hollow that knowledge must be. Let’s do this.
We start out with the death of Alexander
the Great and move back and then sometimes forward and then sometimes back again through time.
Really I think Oliver Stone just took all the scenes and put them in one of those Bingo ball turners and as they popped
out at random he yelled out the order to his editor. In an attempt to tie things
together he has Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) dictate the histories to a scribe at the great library of Alexandria (the one Christians
burned down to protect the world from pagan knowledge) so I guess you could use the excuse that old people don’t remember
things right for why the movie is completely out of order. As we meet the young
Alexander the movie introduces two important themes that will be revisited throughout the movie. One is people get raped quite often and two is Angelina Jolie is bat shit insane. Val Kilmer plays Alexander’s drunk and vicious dad Phillip and Jolie plays his mom who insists his
real dad is Zeus, also she’s like that old lady with a hundred cats only instead of cats she keeps snakes. What I really like about the entire theme Angelina Jolie is bat shit insane is that she talks like
Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle and we get great moments like the one where Phillip comes in and attempts to rape her
and then tries to throttle her in front of their son (after calling her awesome names like “ten-titted bitch from Hades”)
and she is on her hands and knees screaming at him “In my WOMB, I carried my avenger!
AAAARRRRRAAAAAAHHHHHH!!” I mean, where else are you gonna get stuff
like that, that’s movie gold right there. It’s like watching an episode
of Cops in period dress; it stays in your head like a catchy tune. When I get
pregnant I am going to have a shirt made that says that. The insanity of the
dialogue is really this movie’s strength, not two minutes later we get another gem “It was said later that Alexander
was never defeated… except by Hephaistion’s thighs.” Genius! “… this is the love between men that can build a city-state and lift us
from our frog pond.” What? I
love it! I mean don’t get me wrong this movie is awful, but come on, MY
WOMB! In fact part of the problem is that there really isn’t dialogue,
it’s really just a string of pompous monologues and men crying, for three hours.
Well that’s not fair, there’s more to it than that, there’s people walking in line and people looking
meaningfully at each other.
Well at least there’s some big battles
right? It’s interesting how Alexander the Great conquered the known world
but Oliver Stone only shows us two battles (really only one and a half) and Alexander pretty much loses both of those. A dust cloud mostly obscures the first battle and the second is so haphazardly directed
that it’s anyone’s guess what’s happening. There’s even
a sequence during the second battle that is shot using over saturated reds which makes figuring out what is going on nearly
impossible, very reminiscent of the nightvision sequence in Rollerball. I actually
thought when watching it “Wow, this is kinda like that green scene in Rollerball, maybe that movie wasn’t that
bad after all.” You see what you make me do movie!? Movie you make me crazy! And even though I knew (historically)
that Alexander didn’t die in battle in India I kept hoping he would. While
we know Alexander the Great was a brilliant strategist we never see anything of the sort, in fact he can’t even hit
a stationary target with a thrown weapon! Of course Stone also employs heavy
use of the shakey cam throughout the battles because it’s none of our business what is going on, which at this point
is so common in films I’m getting used to it. Just put shakey cams and
bullet time in everything, I just don’t care anymore!
What he does choose to show instead are
endless scenes of Alexander and Hephaistion gazing longingly at one another when the director could have shaved like 40 minutes
out of the movie by giving those two just one love scene. We spend endless scenes
listening to Ptolemy tell us about everything Alexander does when Stone could have saved us precious time by just showing
us, I’d even settle for a montage, just show me and stop telling me. Instead
of getting a glimpse of what made Alexander such an amazing leader who could lead his men to the ends of the world, we get
yet more endless scenes of Alexander being drunk and petulant. We are left just
having to take everyone’s word that Alexander is indeed great and not the flamboyant asshole he appears to be.
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