Guess he’s not so easy to interpret as a character. I was checking if there would be enough to write something interesting about.
But I count only 4 movies and 2 TV specials??
Not counting documentaries or out-of-time stuff like epic rap battles.
Television:
Adventure Story (starring Sean Connery as Alexshander) UK 1961
Alexander the Great (unaired pilot, wildly inaccurate by the way, with Adam West and William Shatner) 1968
Movies:
Alexander the Great from 1956 and from 2004
And two Indian (!) movies (his campaign reached India), Sikandar from 1941 and Sikandar e Azam from 1965.
I’d have thought there’d be more obscure stuff like '50s televised plays and such.
By the way if anyone can help me find the last one from India, “Sikandar e Azam”, on DVD that would be really really great. There was an English subtitled DVD once but it’s hard to find and some copies are unreadable - I mean this legally of course.
But of course, you’ll have noticed that some of those don’t really qualify. Footsteps = documentary, and the Smallville reference, now that is really scraping the barrel.
The two other Indian examples are interesting though… I don’t think they are simple docudrama’s, they seem like proper historical epic series.
Compared to who? Not a lot of movies about Julius Caesar, , or Napoleon either… I don’t think there’s a single movie about Charlemagne, Cyrus the Elder, Augustus…
For what it’s worth, Troy, despite my generally low opinion of it, has caused me to now forever picture Achilles as Brad Pitt, Hector as Eric Bana and Agamemnon as Brian Cox. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The rest of the cast clearly weren’t as memorable, since they haven’t stuck to my mental eyeball in the same way. Especially whoever that Swedish looking lady was who rather offensively played Helen. Who else was even in it, BTW? Googles. What, Orlando Bloom was Paris? I completely forgot.
To return to the OP somewhat, allow me to also opine on the 2004 Alexander. That’s an odd case, at least for me. Some historical movies are bad for clear reasons, where the the major one is usually that the filmmakers didn’t care about the history. But Alexander? Well, there are problems you can pinpoint. For starters, the casting of its lead character, which is so batshit weird that someone must have been on shrooms. I have nothing against Colin Farrell, but what was he doing there? Maybe it sounded good in theory, though. But beyond that? Well, its heart is in the right place. It does care about the history. It’s mostly just vaguely crap, in a way I can’t really put my finger on. It’s not really a bad historical movie, it’s more just a bad movie, period.
I’m desperate for someone to make a movie or three about Caesar. When I become a multi-billionaire, which should happen any day now, I’ll be happy to put up the financing. Well, as long as I get to meddle in every step of the process, obviously, as Hollywood would bollix it up completely on their own.
Alexander is a tricky subject for even modern audiences because he wasn’t the most strictly heterosexual of conquerors. People don’t know how to identify with him. (And identifying with the movie subject is crucial to mainstream success.)
Well I was talking about historical movies, not homoerotic western supremacy fantasies where a few names of people and places happen to be slightly similar to real events.
Exactly, there probably wasn’t a decade that didn’t produce two or three films with Caesar featured prominently in them. (Even if he did get murdered for being too ambitious.)
