Alexander (2004) Review
5/10
A man conquers most of the known world before he’s 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 real 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 can’t stop because stopping means becoming ordinary, is worth a film.
Alexander leaves me frustrated more than bored. There’s a great film buried in these three hours. I can see it in both battles and in half the performances, and Stone keeps smothering it under narration and council scenes. The 5 is where my admiration for the ambition and my impatience with the shape cancel each other out.
What defeats it is the thing biographies always run into. A life isn’t 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 didn’t recut once to restore studio deletions. He recut three times, in different directions, including one version that reorders the chronology considerably. 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. That 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. I respect Stone’s stubbornness here, and I also think the recuts prove he never worked out what the film was.
Compare it to Lawrence of Arabia. That 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 the discovery destroys him. Move any hour of that film and it collapses. That’s what a structure is, and no amount of money substitutes for having one.
When a work can be reorganized at will, it has no essential 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’s a ceiling. Editing can fix pace, emphasis and clarity, and it can’t 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’ve just watched.
Some of it is defensible. The historical record 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 doesn’t do that. Ptolemy isn’t unreliable, he’s not contradicted, and his account is simply correct. So the device becomes a delivery mechanism for information the drama failed to convey.
What gives it away is how often he explains a feeling. When a narrator tells you a character’s mother tormented him, immediately after a scene with the mother, the scene didn’t work and somebody knew it. Every time Hopkins starts talking again, I feel the film losing its nerve, and I’d have cut half his lines and let the audience sort things out.
Farrell Is Better Than the Reception Allowed
Colin Farrell was thirty and the critical response focused on the blond hair and the accent. That’s the level at which this film got discussed.
What he’s playing is a man who’s 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 weren’t, so the film moves at half speed through its most personal material.
Angelina Jolie’s Olympias is the other performance people mock and it’s 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. He’s a one-eyed drunk who’s a superb general, contemptuous of his son and frightened of him at the same time. 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 stands on its own. Kilmer walks off with the whole movie in that cave, and I wanted twice as much of him.
A protagonist whose defining trait is that he can’t stop is difficult to structure, because a want that’s 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 doesn’t use it, because building the film on that relationship was a decision nobody in 2004 was going to sign off on.
The Battles Are 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’ve 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. That’s 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 isn’t 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, and it’s the part that frustrates me most. An army that’s 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’s the story of Alexander that works, and I’d trade an hour of council scenes to get it.
What It Cost
A hundred and fifty-five million dollars against a hundred and sixty-seven worldwide, which after marketing is a major 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. That 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 heavy audience afterward.
That pattern says something specific. This is a work people want to spend time with at length, in their own time, in a version they choose, and it was released as a mass theatrical event. That was the wrong shape for it in every respect.
Stone has kept saying so. He’s 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 couldn’t solve. That persistence is admirable and it’s 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’s worth checking before you start. Ask what the natural unit of your material is, and whether the form you’ve 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. That’s a different appetite from a cinema audience and a much larger one.
Should you watch Alexander?
Watch the Ultimate Cut. It’s the version Stone spent ten years arriving at. This is a film with two terrific 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. It gets a 5 from me because the parts I admire are very good and the stretches between them are a slog, and no amount of recutting was ever going to supply the spine it never had.
