Just another gay review

This contains spoilers, obviously.

There've been a lot of bad reviews about Alexander, mostly centering on the Eew factor of watching grown men stare meaningfully into each other's eyes ala Sam and Frodo.

This movie starts with a death scene of Alexander (seriously, who would've thought otherwise?) followed by Anthony Hopkins in a garden-like library. At first I thought he was teaching a class, but then later found out that he was actually narrating the life story of Alexander to his scribes. Near the end of the movie it comes to me (finally) that the library is one of the Wonders of the World, but I forgot the name of it. :p

Gripes:
My main gripe is that with Alexander, they could've made it into a set of maybe 15 cassettes and nothing much would be lost in the transition. The point of making a movie that cost an excess of $100 million is to show the audience the story, not narrate virtually the whole damn thing.

If you want to narrate, that's fine. Films strong on narration have succeeded, but don't ignore one point: a strong and interesting script. (Dogma)

In continuance with the point above, Ptolemy's narration is too long and boring. The movie watches like a documentary, and if I wanted to watch a documentary I would turn on channel 50 and tune in to a more coherent version of Alexander's life and death.

One thing I can bet on, this movie isn't going to win any awards for editing, if any at all. Either the director didn't know how he wanted to tell the story, or the editing team was on Valium and no one bothered to check their work. The story seems to be erratically spliced together, with a completely jarring flashback episode that does absolutely nothing for the storyline at the time it was flashed.

Some flashbacks explain the story so that you go "Aaah, that's why." That's a good flashback. Some flashbacks explain the story but then you go, "Man, that was stupid. Why didn't they tell me that earlier instead?" That's a bad flashback. Guess which one the Alexander's flashback falls under.

The movie focused too much on making Alexander look more like a man and less like a tyrant, to the extent that I don't get why he was called "The Great". Whenever people mention Alexander the Great, the first thing that pops into mind is that he is a great military leader and he was determined as heck. He used strategies that were spectacularly successful (in terms of achieving victory), and he was ruthless to the point that he thought nothing of dragging a live man tied behind a chariot round and round a town until he died. Just like Achilles, only more brutal.

While not sanitising Alexander's sexuality, the director chose to sanitise his brutality. What gives? A great leader can never achieve great things without some measure of ruthlessness in him, and Alexander was perhaps the most ruthless of them all.

Just as well they chose to omit "The Great" and simply chose to call the film "Alexander".

Alexander the Kid was cute. Alexander the Grown Up sucks balls. Of all the people to play the role they had to pick Colin Farrell, the pretty boy who tries to pretend he's not a pretty boy by swearing a lot and sleeping with loads of women.

The movie does not have many battle scenes, which is not necessarily a bad thing (Saving Private Ryan) but with a storyline geared towards the Great Man's personality, you definitely need a capable actor, at the very least. If you can't show determination and cunning through battle scenes, you need to find some other means to do it. If you can't portray how charismatic Alexander is to have inspired his men to march for 10 years, then the movie is lost, because you just can't understand why Alexander did what he did. Farrell is not a strong actor. He can play espionage agents and other 'cool' characters like that, but he cannot play Alexander.

Opposite of the word 'gripes':
It's tolerable (despite all the gripes above) if you don't go in expecting a movie like Troy. The movie's supposed to be a pretty accurate representation of Alexander's life, according to an Alexander-freak friend of mine.

It gives a different perspective on Alexander and shows us (or tries to) the motivation behind the man who managed to conquer half the world in around 10 years. He just wants to get away from his mother. *shrugs*

The main reason I went to watch the movie was because I read this post about the gayness of the movie and wanted to see if Hollywood dared to portray Alexander as the bisexual that he is. I also wanted to see if the director had glorified the sexual aspect as a gimmick, cos that's almost worst than whitewashing Achilles.

Fortunately, what I saw was a man who cares deeply about the people he loved, even though Roxane (Rosario Dawson) is a choice that seemed almost unbelievable, in a bad way. FYI, historically, Bagoas is a eunuch. Haphaestion, IMO a strong man for wishing Alexander gets a son on his wedding night. *tear*

FYI2, bisexuality as a term did not exist in the time of Alexander the Great. It was normal for men to have male lovers, usually younger though, and it was us straight people who were weird. Whenever passing judgements on a movie's portrayal of anything, please remember that context is an important concept to understand.

I complained about too much personality in the gripes section, but humanising Alexander is a pretty good thing to do cos it gives a different view of Alexander on top of the image I already had of him as a ruthless leader. If I didn't know jackshit about Alexander I would've complained more.

We also got to see the softer side of Alexander, in a sense that documentaries only told us "he took mercy on those who surrendered", but never said he allowed the Persian princess extensive freedoms after he conquered her father's lands. I have no idea how accurate that really is, but it's a pretty nice thing to do.

Finally, Cleitus. Who is hot.

Special section:
Special section dedicated to Angelina Jolie, the only ogle-able female and the best looking character in the entire movie. Of course, they compensated by making her freaky as heck. Olympias is sexy, but seriously weird. Notice how Jolie really shines when she's doing oddball roles? And I swear she got that campy accent from Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing.

While the movie has strong Oedipal undercurrents that're pretty disturbing, Angelina Jolie makes it watchable. She looks like she's having fun in the movie, as opposed to Farrell's hangdog look.

Note: Picture captions from top to bottom: Alexander movie poster; Olympias and a young Alexander; Alexander at the Battle of Gaugamela; Alexander marrying Roxane; last battle scene in the movie (which shows Alexander to be a prety stupid leader); Haphaestion; Olympias, Philip and Alexander, the happy family; Angelina Jolie as Olympias.

Most pictures taken from this site.