★★★
Regardless of the edition (these comments are based on the “Ultimate Cut”),
Alexander is a flawed project. It sprawls across geography, time, and a huge cast, spending too little time with elements to let us get to know them. A map in the scene with Aristotle tries to give us our geographic exposition, but we get that map early and in the context of discussion of values, so it’s easy to overlook it until we realize later that we need to know where places like Bactria are. Stone could also have handled the flashbacks better. While it’s not hard to follow them given the titles, when
Alexander settles down into cutting between the hero’s childhood and his Eastern campaign, a predictability develops that becomes monotonous, especially when the links between the adult Alexander and the child don’t always seem worth the time we spend in the past. We don’t need this many scenes of Philip’s drinking and Olympias’ snakes, for example, for us to recognize that his father was abusive and his mother strange and overprotective.
The large cast is a problem, too.
Alexander wants to identify the hero’s friends as individuals, especially the four that would later be so important to history, but it’s hard to recognize them here since they dress alike and are often in a group together. On the other hand, the film occasionally slows down to have us focus on individuals like the Persian general or Alexander’s wife, but then those characters don’t have much to do later in the film. And related to that problem with characters,
Alexander sometimes slows down to spend time on a scene that then contributes little to the overall arc of the movie. For example, we watch an extended scene of Darius' wife coming before Alexander, but she completely vanishes from the film afterwards.
But even with these problems, Alexander is a fun watch. Most interesting, Stone gives us a hero here that the director himself can admire. A dynamic, rebellious leader, Stone’s Alexander indulges his curiosity and restlessness, and he succeeds grandly in doing so. When Alexander has conquered most of the known world, rather than doing as his generals want and returning home rich and powerful, he wants to continue into the unknown with the restiveness that Stone admires in much of his work. Stone also gives us Alexander’s continual questioning in scenes like that when he’s trying to figure out if the monkeys in Northern India are human or not. The hero also defies social conventions. Alexander’s sexual interests, which range from women to feminine men to masculine men, are an obvious example, but as a leader, he also shows little interest in beating down opponents he’s defeated in battle, rather preferring to respect them and take them into his empire. And he isn’t one to accept conventional wisdom. We see that, even as a youth, Alexander was ready to disagree with Aristotle. And the King is a great democrat, too, seeing the human-ness in everyone. He not only marries a non-Greek, but he also wants to bring education and development to the provinces he subdues. His vision is to lift all humanity by incorporating the best of all the peoples he encounters, a liberal ideal that Stone endorses in several films.
Alexander also gives us a lot to look at on the screen. In Stone’s battle sequences, we always know where everyone is in relation to each other, and the director uses editing to great effect. His fast cuts, changing perspectives, jump cuts, and blurring of movement involve us by creating a sense of being on the field, and a few startling images from a battle -- like the trunk of an elephant being severed -- keep us watching for the next thing that will surprise us. Stone can use color to great effect in the battles, particularly the last battle that shifts from a somewhat normal tonal range to a bright red one. And in addition to the battles, there’s much else to engage us as viewers. There is spectacle, rich décor and vast landscape in
Alexander. Sequences like the celebration on the Eastern frontier bring imaginative ceremony and trappings to the screen. It’s a film that’s easy to watch.
It’s a pity that there are so many insurmountable problems with
Alexander, but there’s so much to cinematic pleasure that it’s still worth the time a viewer will spend enjoying it.
