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Directed by: Oliver Stone
Starring: Colin Farrell, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
Alexander's been hyped up to the hilt, as a magnificent epic, the proving ground of Colin Farrell, a cinematic spectacle...well it's certainly the last one, although the first two are harder to call.
This is a very very long film. Unlike the Lord of the Rings films which seemed over in a flash, Alexander certainly reminds you of its length by being interminably slow on more than one occasion. The film purports to tell the story of the man who 'single-handedly formed the Western world', and yet oddly misses out important battles, relegating them to footnotes in Hopkins' narration. Stone also favours skipping about in Alexander's life, oddly inserting a scene concerned Alexander's ascension to the throne in the middle of a sequence of Alexander in India - disturbing the temporal order may work if you're Quentin Tarantino, but its a technique woefully out of place in a historical epic.
Kilmer is captivating as Alexander's father Phillip, acting out his madness and bravery with gusto, while Jolie evidently relished playing the eerie Olympias, constantly draped as she is in snakes. Even Farrell manages a range of emotions as Alexander goes from brave military genius, to power-crazed glory hunter. Yet all three performances are hampered by a woefully inept script - the dialogue is clunky and overblown, which would be fine for Alexander's rousing speeches to his troops (though Maximus did it better), but in supposed tender scenes between Alexander and his best friend/male lover Haephestion (Leto), it just renders all emotion about as realistic as your average daytime soap.
The accents adopted by the main players are also somewhat peculiar - I've yet to work out what Jolie's is supposed to be, wavering as it does somewhere near Russian, while Kilmer and Leto et.al have somehow become Irish to match Farrell.
However, my biggest problem is the character of Alexander himself. Farrell plays him well, make no mistake, I just feel that his obsession with Achilles and Prometheus renders him too power-mad to be a fully sympathetic character. Indeed, by the end of the film, I was ready to poison him.
I'd suggest waiting for the DVD...
