Alexander-WTF happened to Oliver Stone?(Spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I saw “Alexander” tonight. I was…disappointed, to say the very least.

Okay, I really LIKE huge, historical epics. Alexander would seem to fit the bill. Unfortunatly, it has all of the weaknesses of a huge epic and none of the strengths.

There are only two battles in the entire movie, Alexander seems far too revisionist(He talks of freeing people from their overlords in one breath and then talks about his subjects. Somehow I don’t think the real Alexander gave a royal shit about the people’s freedom). Why does every historical warlord have to be a great “Man of the people”, so concerned with a 20th century conception of Human rights? Can’t we show them as they really probably were?

Sorry, I’m ranting. Most of the movie is a combination of the following: Alexander wandering around Persia(seemingly at random), Alexander having flashbacks from his mother(which are really creepy, because she seems to LOVE him, in a not-so-subtle reverse oedipian way. In fact, there was a bit of a Norman Bates vibe towards the end), and a bit about his homosexuality and personal life.

I don’t care that he’s shown as being gay(since he probably was), but it seems like this thing takes up far too much of the film. In fact, the movie drags on for 3 hours, and much of it didn’t need to be there. Oliver Stone really needs an editor. We were making fun of it for most of the film, and even then we stopped the movie about 10-20 minutes before it ended. We were wondering: WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END? But that that point, I took a poll and all of decided just to turn the film off because we figured nothing interesting was going to happen int he time left, considering little of interest had happened in the last 2 1/2 hours.

So it’s a historical epic with two rather badly done battles(whose winning? I don’t know. During the 2nd one, I didn’t care) and a king going on and on about high ideals that sounds more like a college liberal arts major then a warlord…and goes to slaughter people. Except we don’t see the slaughter. A long campaign across asia, and we see no fighting except at the beginning and end. A campaign without visible battles. He’s wandering around Afganistan, presumably because he doesn’t want to stop and ask for directions, instead of taking the more direct route to India through modern-day Iran(Genius, there were cities between India and Babylon. That would seem smarter to go through them instead of traipsing through the mountains for no apparent reason. There might have been one, but I didn’t hear anything more then “Looking for the Ocean”).

I will admit that the babylon scenes were beatiful to look at though. Though it was funny when they found the kings harem and Alexander talked about “treating them with dignity”. I said “We just slaughtered a couple hundred thousand people. I don’t think a few dozen rape-orgies are really going to put in dutch with the gods”. After that, I said “What would Zeus do? He’s probably kill all the men, turn the women into cows and have sex with them”

Oliver Stone,What the hell happened? I know you can film good battles(Platoon). I know you can film 3 hour films that keep interest(JFK). But lately…Instead, we got a huge, bloated film that runs far too long, has too little of interest,

Troy is a masterpiece in comparison. Braveheart wasn’t particulary accurate, but at least it was fun to watch. It’s pretty bad when even mocking the film doesn’t make it any more bearable.

Why, Stone? WHY?

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This is the first Oliver Stone movie that brought you to this point?

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I was a Braveheart fanatic when it first came out. I thought that film could do no wrong. I was, however, disappointed with the “epics” that followed over the course of the next several years (continuing into today), including Gladiator, The Patriot, King Arthur, Master and Commander, Troy (this one was actually tolerable, but not great by any stretch), The Last Samurai, Kingdom of Heaven, etc, etc. They all seem to be trying to be Braveheart and this has even spoiled, to an extent, my enjoyment of that movie. It’s like they’re going back and highlighting all the bad aspects of Braveheart, underlining them in red ink, rolling them up, and smacking the audience in the face with them.

That said, I knew Alexander was going to bad. I had no idea, however, that it was going to be one of the biggest steaming piles of feces ever commited to celluloid. What an incomprehensibly bad movie.

I honestly believe that the average college student, given a quarter of the budget, could make a better film. I have no idea how, as the project rolled further and further into Dungtown, Stone didn’t get shitcanned by the studio. How much money did this tour-de-farce lose?

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I’ve only seen “Platoon” and “JFK”, but I liked both of those.

What I think is wierd is that Stone blamed the films poor showing on “Christians who were upset about the gay thing”. Actually, the gay thing was part of it, but the amount of time devoted to it was totally unessacary and uninteresting. The real problem is that the movie was…well, I’ve gone over that.

He just wishes he could blame this on fundementalists.

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The movie was painful.

Stone must have a gift, he actually made the battle of Gaugamela boring. That takes talent. I mean, we’re talking about one of the most amazing military victories ever won, like Hanibal at Cannae… a victory where a vastly outnumbered force not just beat their enemy, but routed them.

I was also pissed off at all the ‘freedom’ talk. Freedom, as an ideal, did not exist in the way we think of it. It is ab-freaking-surd.

We also stopped watching the movie before it was done. We got about an hour or two into it, and nobody in the room cared what was happening or cared to see what was going to happen.

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Damn, I guess you missed the last ten minutes, where Alexander defeats any man’s greatest foe. Which is…an army of dinosaur-riding Mongolian skeleton men storming out from Atlantis!

Ha. You thought I was going to say “fear of death” or “his own insecurities” or something, didn’t ya? Betcha feel silly about sending the DVD back to Netflix, now. :smiley:

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Ooh! I wanna see that movie!

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LOL. That was my thought as well.

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I get sad just thinking about it…

A couple years ago I got all excited about the fact that there were not one but TWO movies about Alexander being made. One by Baz Luhrmann and the other, of course, by Oliver Stone. I figured one of them had to be good.

So anyhow, the more time that goes by, the more excited I get - until I find out that Baz Luhrmann killed his project (the one I was more excited for - I like Leo DiCaprio, I think he would have been a good Alexander.) which distressed me a bit but I thought, no matter Oliver Stone will do a good job.

At the time I was excited about the fact that progress was being made alarmingly quickly on the movie as it meant I can watch it sooner. I find out later it was ALL about beating Baz Lurmann to release.

So anyhow it’s about a month until liftoff and I read a glowing article in Premiere and I am absolutely pumped - almost to Return of the King level. Oh it was going to be good, I thought.

Then the reviews come in. The first five were brutal. These guys just hate Oliver Stone I think. It’s sheer dumb luck. It must be. Rottentomatoes will be swarmed by good reviews pushing the number up into the 90 range, I just know it. The bad reviews keep coming and coming and coming.

I was still moderately exited at this point, although some of the wind was out of my sail. Then I watched it.

Good God.

It almost ruined my year - until I saw the Aviator and Million Dollar Baby, that helped a bit.

I hope you enjoyed my story, I’m not sure it added a whole lot to the thread but at least it’s on the same topic. I’ll end it with a plea to Mr. Luhrmann to wait five years or so and try again. I know you can do it.

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Isn’t it obvious?
They got to him!

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A month or two back I was in the video store trying to pick between Troy and Alexander, neither of which I had seen. I picked Troy and wasn’t sure I had made the right choice. Now I know I did!

I don’t see this at all. They seem like two completely different types of movies. I liked both, M+C somewhat more than Braveheart.

I know M+C disappointed a lot of people who were expecting more of an action movie but I found it to be surprisingly character driven. Braveheart on the other hand was a pull-out-all-the-stops historical action epic (and yes, I know much of the history was wrong but I assumed as much as I was watching it).

I guess one of the most obvious differences for me is that Wallace in Braveheart is practically Superman…for a while he is pretty much invincible both militarily and physically. He is always in the right place at the right time to get the drop on his enemies (at least for most of the movie).

Aubrey in M+C isn’t even close to invincible, in fact he repeatedly makes mistakes and gets caught with his guard down, and his men take a beating because of it. It’s only at the end they finally get the drop on the bad guys.

(My favorite aspect of Braveheart is the evil, scheming, plotting Longshanks as portrayed by Patrick McGoohan. What a badass!)

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Follow up:

Alexander is a Waterworld wrapped in a Heaven’s Gate inside an Ishtar.

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me too!

I didn’t even like JFK. Platoon and Wall Street were OK, but his ego left his talent behind after that.

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That was just befire he became a Super Seiyan :smiley:

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My favorite part was in the middle of the battle when this black guy comes stumbling through the battle shouting

Waaalt!

-Joe

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According to IMDB, it cost about $150 million to make and grossed about $167 million worldwide.

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17 million in profit, however, should be accounted a loss because the money could easily have made a lot more elsewhere.

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When a movie grosses 167 million, the studio usually sees about half of that. It’s still a loss for the production company for a little while.

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And it only grossed 34 million domestically. Wouldn’t the profits from overseas be a lot less?

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Frankly, I was a bit skeptical of the part where Alexander triumphs over the Mongolian skeleton leader, Genghis von Zipper, at the Big Atlantis Surf-Off. I’m pretty sure that never really happened.