Natural Boring Killers
Alexander the-not-so Great Fails to Conquer Troy

If the History Channel had a regular soap opera, I bet it would be a lot like Oliver Stone’s new movie Alexander. The tears, the arguments, the cheating hearts of this new film have all the hallmarks of a successful plunge into daytime television angst.

“In this scene, you kill three guys and only kiss one. You got that?” Director Oliver Stone and actor Colin Farrell on the set of Alexander.

Over the years, Stone has set himself apart from many other filmmakers by being his own man and daring his viewers to disagree with his vision. The resulting films—JFK, Platoon, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Born on the Fourth of July and The Doors—have occasionally ruffled some feathers and incited fierce debate on whether the director is a genius or a paranoid crank.

But until Alexander, they’ve never been boring. This movie is for Stone what The Gangs of New York was for Martin Scorcese. That is to say indulgent, overly long, full of suspect acting performances, and without any real emotional payoff at the end.

Alexander is the bold biographical depiction of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror who died at the age of 33 in the year 323 B.C. More explorer than king, Alexander led his army on a 22,000-mile march from the Mediterranean to India and back, conquering other cultures and creating the first trade routes from Europe to Asia.

As played by Colin Farrell, Alexander the Great is a wide-eyed fanatic, more desperate for the approval of his parents than for the riches of the world.

Stone obviously wants there to be no ambiguity as to Alexander the Great’s sexual orientation. When Alexander is not kissing or killing other men, he’s generally embroiled in some manner of loud hissy fit with them. Stone also steers the audience toward nurture, as opposed to nature, as the source of Alexander’s homosexuality by portraying his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), as a domineering power-mad harpy and all the other women in his life as slightly inferior replicas of his mom.

“I think you have to love every character you play,” said Jolie. “If you think they are crazy or just wrong, you can’t play them without conviction. A lot of people say that she was insane, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t do exactly the same for my son. That might sound scary, but in 330 B.C., when people were being murdered left and right, it was a harder way of living and so Olympias was a hard, sometimes frightening woman. But in the end, she wanted Alexander to be as great and as strong as he could be, and I identify with that.”

It’s the stuff of Sigmund Freud, Oedipus Rex and soap operas and by and large Alexander could do with less of the psychological dissection of the man and more of his actual deeds.

Val Kilmer practically steals the show as Alexander’s father Phillip Macedonia. With one eye permanently welded shut (there appears to be a lot of that going around in Ancient Greece), Kilmer struts and staggers his way into the hearts of his countrymen in a manner that Alexander can never match.

Other than a fine performance by Anthony Hopkins as the narrator Ptolemy, the rest of the characters are relegated to little more than scenery. And is it just my hearing, or is everyone in the movie using a different accent? Jolie sounds like she’s from Mexico, Kilmer sounds like he’s trying to channel the spirit of Oliver Reed, and everyone else has got some sort of Irish brogue going on.

All this is not to say that Alexander is a movie without merit. The choreography of the battle scenes—particularly the last one—is remarkable although the filmmakers rely a little too much on blurry and jerky action sequences. The set designs are terrific, especially when Alexander leads his army into the heart of mysterious Babylon with its hanging gardens and remarkable architecture.

As in all Stone movies, there’s going to be that one scene that just pushes the envelope a bit too much. In Alexander it is an extremely brief battle scene where an elephant has its trunk chopped off with a big sword. It’s an interesting psychological question on how you can do all manner of ghastly things to humans in a movie and get away with it. And then the moment you hurt an animal the audience gasps in horror.

At the end of the day, Alexander (like Troy) is an example of how you can spend all the money in the world making a movie look like an epic film and then have inferior acting and dialogue reduce it to a TV movie of the week.

Alexander is rated R for violence and some sexuality and nudity. It is currently playing at the Regal Cinema in Boone.