Alexander (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"ALEXANDER RIVALS MONTY PYTHON FOR SURREAL LEVELS OF FARCE"

-BBC-

This is a biopic about Alexander the Great, or simply Big Al, as I like to call him. (Or Big Paddy, as I should probably call him, since he and everyone around him apparently spoke with Irish accents.)

It was a mega-bomb of astronomical proportions.

• Made for $155 million, it grossed $34 million.
• American critics scorned it. British critics found it unworthy of their scorn, and ridiculed it instead.
• It was nominated for six Razzies.

At the top of his game, Oliver Stone is a great filmmaker, but this movie is just so jaw-droppingly bad in so many ways that it should be used as the official screening criterion in film criticism societies. Any critics who gave this a good review should be called in front of their peers and have their pencil broken over their editor's knee, in the manner of that opening scene in "Branded."

The most irritating thing about the film is the sequencing. Scott Weinberg of efilmcritic.com had the point exactly right: "You could literally chop Alexander up into six 30-minute blocks, reassemble it at random, and the movie would make the exact same amount of sense (i.e. none)." The film follows the same pattern again and again: there's totally boring chit-chat and background for about a half an hour, followed by a scene where you are finally starting to get involved, and then - just as something is finally about to happen - followed by a word slide that says "ten years earlier, in Babylon" or "2300 years later, in Pennsylvania" - or whatever - thus changing the story's focus and assuring that you will never at any time actually be interested in what is going on. Every time that happens, you can almost hear Tom Servo saying, "Meanwhile, in another movie."

That was the deal-breaker, the one element which secures the film's place as bad cinema in a serious conversation. On the other hand, who cares about serious conversations? There are other, more entertaining elements which place it in the realm of so-bad-it's-almost-good.

• The accents are crazy. Colin Farrell chose to play Alexander with his natural Irish accent. Jared Leto, who does not normally have an Irish accent, decided to adopt one since that seemed to be the official way to represent ancient Macedonians. Others in the cast followed suit. All non-Macedonians (Angelina Jolie, for example), to demonstrate that they are foreign speakers, talk like Borat.

• It's hard to believe it, but I've now watched this film three times because there are three distinct versions. The theatrical film is 176 minutes long. If you prefer, you can get Oliver Stone's 167 minute "director's cut." Most film versions bearing that particular appellation are longer than the theatrical cut, but Stone felt the film was better shorter. I'm sure he was right, but this raises the question of why, if Stone now likes the film better nine minutes shorter, he just didn't cut it that way in the first place. Did the MPAA pressure him to put scenes in? (Technically, he took out about eighteen minutes of the theatrical footage and added in some ten minutes of different footage, if you really care about such minutiae.) There is a full-length commentary on the DVD, and that may answer the question, but I am not about to watch this movie again to find out. If you're really a glutton for punishment, you can try to survive Stone's "Final Cut," which was issued three years after the theatrical run, and is 214 minutes long. It includes everything. Not just everything shot for this particular movie, but every scene ever filmed for every movie in the history of color photography. Seriously, it has everything from both of the other cuts plus another 30 minutes or so of additional footage, with all the scenes re-ordered once again. I can't really offer an opinion about whether the final cut improved the film. My sense was that it did flow better, but I fast-forwarded through all the scenes I had already seen, so I really didn't get any sense of the whole film in context.

• The sets are sometimes downright ludicrous. There is no doubt that Oliver Stone knows how to get a big, lush. expensive look up there on the screen, but the result in this case is that the entire film looks totally artificial. Most scenes look exquisitely beautiful and colorful - far too beautiful to represent life in 320 BC. It's all clean and sanitized and perfectly art-decorated and gaily-colored, until it no longer looks like the actual film of Alexander the Great, but a nice well-scrubbed Disney ride based on the film. There is very little grit to it. Everyone has gorgeous teeth. The colors are vivid. Everything sparkles. As Movie Juice pointed out: "Anthony Hopkins wanders about his terrace as minions water scores of obviously plastic plants amidst a selection of statues that look barely authentic enough to stand in your local Chucky Cheese." Actually, it looked to me as if he was standing in my local garden center, shopping for faux-classical statues.

• Ol' Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be playing Ptolemy I, and he has a beautiful garden palace overlooking the Alexandria harbor, with a great view of the famous lighthouse. One problem with that is that the film shows the lighthouse burning a fire on a sunny day. (It did use the fire at night, but provided illumination with mirrors in sunlight.) The far greater problem is that Ptolemy is looking out over a scene which could only have been seen after his death. Ptolemy conceived the lighthouse, but it was not completed and functioning until the reign of his son, Ptolemy II, who dedicated it as a memorial to his parents. The film therefore pictures Ptolemy looking out over his own memorial. (Pictured below left.) And it sure doesn't look all that spiffy for a newly-built (or not-yet-built) monument which was said to be covered in white marble. As shown here it looks like a grungy brown factory from post-Dickensian London.

• There is no real sense of dialogue. Oliver Stone really wanted to present the facts correctly, and many individual scenes required a great deal of background information, so that was covered with conferences in which Alexander and his henchmen discussed all the technical issues. "Now you, valiant Oneguy, hold the center just long enough until staunch Otherguy, oh, brave, brave Otherguy, hero of a thousand combats, can turn his column  ... etc " The transitions between scenes and the overall narrative continuity were handled by a framing device in which an old Ptolemy (Tony Hopkins) looks back on Big Als' life and narrates to the camera, basically reciting either a history lesson or purple prose. ("I have known many great men, but only one Colossus. Thank Zeus, because I don't know the plural of Colossus. Is it Colossi or Colossuses or Colossopods or what? Somebody look that up and get back to me.") When the tedious background information has all been conveyed, the remaining talk is stagy speechifying, even in the love scene. Big Al says to his bride on their wedding night, in the middle of a semi-rape: "A man searches for a woman at the top of the world, and finds her," in the spirit of "Ron Burgundy is down, and it's bad." The bride and groom were supposed to be alone at that point, but I was expecting her to turn around to see whom he was speaking to.

I could go on to mention the obvious problems, but why bother? Everybody has noted that Big Al's mom is the same age as he, and looks younger. Everyone has already noted that Alexander is a whiny talk-too-much bitch. Why did they need macho Colin Farrell for the role? As it is written here, Paul Giamatti would have been better, or better yet Andy Dick, who already had the right hairstyle.

Are there positives? Yes, there were a few things I liked.

• The opening credits are beautiful and elegant.
• The musical score by Vangelis is appropriate for the epic scope of the story.
• Val Kilmer brought some weight to the role of Philip of Macedon, Big Al's dad. (In more ways than one. He gained fifty pounds.)
• The aerial shots of the big battle scene are both spectacular and useful, in that we are able to see the strategies employed by massive armies moving into their various formations.
• Some of the other battle footage is impressive, especially the parts with exotic animals in combat.
• The march into Babylon (below right) looks kind of impressive in a Roger Rabbit, "humans performing in front of cartoon backdrops" kind of way.

Given the sweep and majesty of the project, or at least the attempt at it, it is probably worth your while to rent the Alexander Final Cut DVD if you love the big epics. The blessing of the DVD format is that you'll be able to see all of those spectacular elements and fast-forward through everything else, because it is just so-o-o-o long. The supreme irony of the project is that Alexander himself died so young that he would not have had time to watch this movie.