Alexander (2004) Review
5/10
A man conquers most of the known world before he is thirty-three and dies in Babylon, and the film covers roughly two decades of it in three hours, narrated by Ptolemy as an old man dictating to a scribe.
The 5 is for real spectacle and one genuine idea. The battle at Gaugamela is superbly staged, the Hydaspes sequence is a nightmare filmed in red, and Stone’s actual subject, a man who cannot stop because stopping means becoming ordinary, is worth a film.
What defeats it is the thing biographies always run into. A life is not a story, and this one has no antagonist, no reversal and no shape, so the film substitutes narration, and narration is what a film reaches for when the structure is missing.
Four Cuts in Ten Years
The theatrical version ran a hundred and seventy-five minutes in 2004. A Director’s Cut followed in 2005, Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut in 2007, and the Ultimate Cut in 2014.
That sequence is unusual and it tells you what happened. Stone did not recut once to restore studio deletions. He recut three times, in different directions, including one version that reorders the chronology substantially.
The Ultimate Cut is the strongest, and it works by accepting the material’s shape instead of fighting it. It runs longest, moves the childhood material, and gives Olympias and Philip more room, which turns the film from a campaign chronicle into a story about a man raised by two people who hated each other.
But the existence of four versions is the diagnosis. A film that can be reordered this heavily and still function was never held together by its structure, because there was no structure to disturb.
Compare it to Lawrence of Arabia, which covers a comparable sweep and has an unbreakable spine. A man is given a task, succeeds beyond anybody’s expectation, discovers what he enjoyed about it, and is destroyed by the discovery. Move any hour of that film and it collapses. That is what a structure is, and no amount of money substitutes for having one.
When a work can be reorganized at will, it has no load-bearing sequence. A well-built story breaks when you move things, and the breaking is evidence that the order was doing work.
Recutting is a legitimate rescue and it has a ceiling. Editing can fix pace, emphasis and clarity, and it cannot supply a want, an opponent or a reversal that was never shot.
For prose the parallel is restructuring a draft. If moving chapter nine to chapter three improves it and costs nothing, the chapters were episodes instead of a sequence.
The Narration Is Doing the Structure’s Job
Anthony Hopkins as an aged Ptolemy narrates throughout, explaining Alexander’s motives, contextualizing the politics, and telling us what to conclude about scenes we have just watched.
Some of it is defensible. The historical record genuinely comes to us through later accounts, Ptolemy wrote one, and a film about a man whose story survives only as other people’s versions could do something interesting with that.
The film does not do that. Ptolemy is not unreliable, he is not contradicted, and his account is simply correct. So the device becomes a delivery mechanism for information the drama failed to convey.
The tell is how often he explains a feeling. When a narrator tells you a character was tormented by his mother, immediately after a scene with the mother, the scene did not work and somebody knew it.
Farrell Is Better Than the Reception Allowed
Colin Farrell was thirty and the critical response focused on the blond hair and the accent, which is the level at which this film got discussed.
What he is playing is a man who is frightened all the time and has decided that momentum is the only thing keeping him from noticing it. Alexander in this film weeps, doubts, drinks and is visibly falling apart while conquering, and Farrell plays all of it.
The material around him refuses to commit. Stone is interested in Alexander’s relationships with Hephaestion and with Bagoas and treats them seriously, and the 2004 marketing and the studio evidently were not, so the film moves at half speed through its most personal material.
Angelina Jolie’s Olympias is the other performance people mock and it is the correct choice for the part. She plays a woman who has spent her life in a court that would kill her given cause, performing menace as a survival strategy, and the accent is an affect the character is choosing.
Val Kilmer’s Philip is the film’s most human element and gets the least attention. A one-eyed drunk who is a superb general, contemptuous of his son and frightened of him at the same time, and the cave sequence where he walks his son past painted myths and explains what each of them cost is the closest this picture comes to a scene that would stand on its own without needing a single frame of the rest of the film standing around it to prop it up.
A protagonist whose defining trait is that he cannot stop is difficult to structure, because a want that has no object also has no achievement.
The fix is an internal opposition with a face. Give him one relationship where stopping is possible and desirable, and the whole campaign becomes a refusal instead of an itinerary.
This film has that in Hephaestion and does not use it, because building the film on that relationship was a decision nobody in 2004 was going to sign off on.
The Battles Are Genuinely Good
Gaugamela is the best sequence Stone has directed. The dust, the enormous width of the formations, the impossible problem of communicating an order across a battlefield, and a single eagle shot that finally shows the audience the shape of a plan they have watched fail to be explained on the ground.
Hydaspes is the more interesting one artistically. Elephants in a forest, and Stone shifts the entire image to red at the moment Alexander is wounded, which is a formal choice a hundred and fifty-five million dollar film had no obligation to make.
The production shot in Morocco and Thailand with enormous physical extras, and it looks like it. Whatever else is wrong, nobody rendered a crowd here and hoped.
The trouble is that two battles across three hours is not a rhythm. The gap between them is filled with council scenes and marches, and the film has no sub-conflicts to occupy the space.
The mutiny material is where the missing film was hiding. An army that has followed a man to the edge of the world and refuses to go further is a real dramatic situation with a real opponent, and it arrives late and gets perhaps fifteen minutes. Built as the spine, that is the story of Alexander that works.
What It Cost
A hundred and fifty-five million dollars against a hundred and sixty-seven worldwide, which after marketing is a substantial loss. The domestic performance was poor and the international take carried most of it.
The reception was hostile in a way that went beyond the film’s quality, and some of that was about its treatment of Alexander’s relationships. A group of Greek lawyers threatened action over the historical portrayal, which tells you what the temperature was.
The home video life is the strange part. The DVD releases sold several million copies across versions, and Alexander Revisited became one of Warner’s highest-selling catalog titles, so a film that failed in cinemas found a substantial audience afterward.
That pattern says something specific. This is a work people want to sit with at length, in their own time, in a version they choose, and it was released as a mass theatrical event, which was the wrong shape for it in every respect.
Stone has kept saying so. He has described the film as the one he cares most about and returns to, and four versions across a decade is a director unable to let go of a subject he could not solve. That persistence is admirable and it is also the evidence.
A sprawling life with no natural climax is a television structure and was released as a film here, thirty years too early to be one.
That is worth checking before you start. Ask what the natural unit of your material is, and whether the form you have been offered can hold it.
Note also what the home video numbers mean. An audience existed and needed permission to take three hours in installments, which is a different appetite from a cinema audience and a much larger one.
Should you watch Alexander?
Watch the Ultimate Cut, which is the version Stone spent ten years arriving at. This is a film with two superb battles, a better lead performance than anybody admitted, and a subject that had no shape until somebody was willing to build the story around a relationship instead of a map.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists