Critics have panned the new Oliver Stone movie, "Alexander," after early previews of the historic epic.
The Oscar-winning director allowed a lucky few a sneak peek of the film -- which stars Colin Farrell and is due for release later this month -- but critics were unimpressed and have voiced their concerns on the Web.
One review, posted on AintItCoolNews.com, reads, "This movie is a mess. According to Stone he just finished this film on Friday and, in my opinion, it looks like he rushed it out the door.
"The story is incohesive, the acting is uninspired and the whole look is incredibly pieced together."
Another adds, "I was stunned -- and I say that without snarky irony -- stunned by how bad this movie was.
"Overacting, bizarro camera work and frame tinting, lackluster battles. God, it was just a mess."
A review on IMDB.com adds, "The movie starts off being shot very traditionally then 2 hours into the movie Stone decides to start shooting this film like 'Natural Born Killers' with infra-red camera shots and scenes washed in red. Very strange and out of place."
I haven't seen any trailer or anything for this yet so I have no actual basis for opinion, but going on what we've seen in recent years from such epic historical tales, this has potential to suck badly. I never bothered going out to see Troy because everyone I heard from said it was a pile of crap too. I liked Gladiator for what it was, but it too was imperfect. How depressing to botch films that have such potential to be great..
I'm not sold on it either. But I'll definitely watch it, on DVD. I haven't yet seen Troy. I'll wait for the DVD release. Gladitator is in my top 5, but I wouldn't say that ANY movie is actually "perfect". I always have SOME form of issue with even the best.
Here's the thing that's gonna bug me about movies like Troy and Alexander: The epic historical movie is WORTHWHILE entertainment when done right, but movies like Troy and Alexander don't appear to be done right, so fans will lose interest in the genre, and the studios will turn away from doing more epic films. The problem isn't with the genre, it's with the movies made within the genre that aren't up to snuff, which frustrates the movie-goers into avoiding the genre. A pity...
I knew it was going to be crap from the first time I saw the FedEx guy drop the movie poster off at the theatre I work at. That was proabably sometime back during the summer.
Opens: November 24th, 2004 (wide)
Starring: Colin Farrell, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Distributed by: Warner Bros.
What's the Story?
Alexander the Great led his army from the small country of Macedonia to conquer 90% of the known world. And he did it by the age of 25. Apparently, you can't be a slacker when your last name is "the Great."
Three Good Reasons
• Director Oliver Stone is making the biggest spectacle of the season and probably his career.
• Colin Farrell is blonde and wears a skirt but is still tough enough to fight an elephant.
• Angelina Jolie is the ultimate hot mom as Alexander's mother, Olympias.
Bet You Didn't Know
Baz Luhrman, director of 'Moulin Rogue,' had been working on his own Alexander the Great movie for Leonardo DiCaprio, but it was put on hold when Stone's flick got off the ground first.
Bet You Didn't Know ... Baz Luhrman, had been working on his own Alexander the Great movie but it was put on hold when Stone's flick got off the ground first.
Elliot Cowan, left, and Colin Farrell, who plays Alexander, star in the film about history's most accomplished conqueror.
Review
'Alexander' turns out to be opposite of great
Angelina Jolie (left) plays Colin Farell's mother, Olympias, in "Alexander."
This bloated, boring historical epic film never truly connects with the audience.
A great botch of a movie that never engages either plot or characters, "Alexander" is a stupefying disaster, the grand turkey of this holiday season so far. It's a serious waste of talent and, at nearly three hours long, time.
This biography of ancient conqueror Alexander the Great arrives in disjointed chunks of information, narrated in the style of a mumbled history lesson by Anthony Hopkins, portraying an aged Ptolemy, one of Alexander's fellow warriors.
Ptolemy stresses right from the beginning that Alexander was a god among men, the most exceptional leader of his or any other time.
Unfortunately, writer-director Oliver Stone offers little emotional evidence to make the statement feel true. We're told of Alexander's power, we never really feel it.
In fact, this is a movie almost totally devoid of feeling or any sense of connection. History is marched out, treachery and battle are put on display, but again, it all seems like a lesson plan being laid out by a disinterested teacher.
The film also has more than a few preposterous elements.
Alexander is played by a bleached blond Colin Farrell, while his mother Olympias is played by Angelina Jolie. She is all of one year older than Farrell and looks it.
Beyond that, she spends much of the film with snakes writhing around her arms, speaking with an apparent Transylvanian accent. She is seriously reminiscent of the evil spy Natasha from "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show."
Val Kilmer, meanwhile, plays Alexander's father, Philip, a drunkard warrior-king with one eye. In perhaps the most jarring shift in recent screenplay history, Stone builds up to a great public argument between father and son -- and then abandons their tension completely, declaring daddy dead and marching off to fill in the scorecard of Alexander's conquests. When he flashes back to Philip much later in the film, suddenly father and son are best buddies again. Huh?
And speaking of "huh?" moments, nobody's going to be surprised that Stone has painted all sorts of possible conspiracy theories into his film, but it is awfully annoying that he never spells out precisely what he thinks the truth is. Did Olympias have Philip killed? Did Alexander? Did Alexander's friends poison him, or did he die a natural death? It's all unclear and, worse, unsatisfying.
But then satisfaction is a scarce commodity in the endurance test that is "Alexander." Ever since "Gladiator," high-profile directors have been trying to replicate that film's success with grandiose period epics that feature elaborate battle sequences ("King Arthur," "Cold Mountain," "Troy," etc.). Most have been huge financial and artistic failures, but "Alexander" comes out on the top (or bottom) of the heap.
One scene says it all: The film's key battle shot involves a horse with Alexander astride, rising up on its back legs as it confronts a war elephant rising up on its back legs. It's supposed to be awe-inspiring, but it looks like two animals preparing to do the mambo in a circus ring, and its laughability reflects the film in its entirety: What's supposed to look powerful, looks silly.
This is pretty much all on Stone, an ambitious filmmaker who obviously lost perspective here. Somebody should have told Jolie to drop the accent and lose the snakes. Somebody should have noticed the film was bereft of all fire. Somebody should have thought, "Hmmm, this does seem to be running on a bit." Alexander may indeed have been great, but in "Alexander" his story is merely grating.
Oliver Stone portrays Alexaner as human. The media and the American public would have liked him to copy Gladiator and tell the story of how a man's internal will and resolve overcomes countless conflicts he faced. Instead Stone shows an internally conflicted man, whose total devotion to a vision drives him to greatness.
I admire how the movie stayed as true to history as possible. But most of all, I admire it for what most critics criticize the most. The movie doesn't pick one central conflict and develop it to its resolution, but instead shows how Alexander puts the pursuit of his vision above all other conflicts in his life. As Ptolemy says in the ending speech, it is the pursuit of our visions that leads a man to greatness. Stone's Alexander shows this and I believe Alexander should be considered a great film as well as a great leader.
11-12-2004 05:46 AM
