Well, welcome to ancient Greece, yeah? Is it one big war zone? Is it one big pride parade? You decide!
We tend to root for whoever wins. That’s because we like it when the good guys win, so when someone wins, we assume they’re the good guys. Unless it’s a sad story, in which case the good guy can lose, if it isn’t really his fault.
Wait, I have an idea. Can we get this guy?
I’d say all the “great men” of antiquity get pretty short shrift at the movies, not just Alexander the Great
Julius Caesar has a decent showing (thanks to Billy Shakespeare). And Spartacus, of course (not that any Ancient Romans would consider him a “great man”)
But how many times have all the Roman Emperors appeared on film combined, including Augustus? (Off the top of my head only I can only think of Marcus Aurelius and Caligula) What about Hannibal? (“Elephants over the alps” Hannibal not “Ate is liver with fava beans and a nice chianti” Hannibal) Pericles? Pyrhus? Hammurabi? Sulla? Marius? Scipio Africanus?
Dammit now we need to get time machine, go back in time before Rick Mayall passed away:( and convince hollywood to make a big budget movie of him playing Alexandar the Great.
Maybe Tony Robinson (thankfully still alive) could play Diogenes the Cynic?
I know its pushing the boundaries of what you are after, but Horrible Histories [Series 1 Ep 4] has a sketch about Alexander’s penchant for naming cities Alexandria.
He could play a megalomaniac, yes. But a bisexual one?
Augustus is mostly a plot device to bring about the fall of Antony and Cleopatra, but he himself is boring as shit - except when Brian Blessed plays him (for once not shouting, but smiling - or suddenly not smiling at all).
Hannibal actually has a few decent Italian films where he is the bad guy: Cabiria (1914) and the pro-fascist Scipione l’Africano (1937). But 1) he lost, and 2) he didn’t even die while losing.
Plus, Hannibal (and the Parthians mentioned above) have the misfortune to be orientals. Everybody know that absolutely all orientals live in tents with camels and harems. They are the exotic Others, not like decent white protestant Romans / Greeks / Egyptians (who we can make believe are just like us). OK, I’m obviously overdoing it now, but only to get the idea across. 
By the way, back to Alexander, still no-one happens to know of a copy of this DVD, in a local library for example? There doesn’t seen to be any other way to see that Alexander movie with subtitles. 
Wow, that early! :eek: I stand corrected!
And in color, too! Very odd for that period, unless they were aiming to get a commitment from NBC, “the first all-color network”! Which would be strange, since they were tight with ABC at the time on account of Combat!
Well, looks like it was mostly done on location, so it probably had to be shot on film anyway…
And the US was ahead. The 1954 (!) Casino Royale TV version was originally in color too, even if the recording isn’t.
Not shouting all that much, true enough, but… IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER!!!
Yes, Augustus can be pretty darned boring. Although, I think it’s possible to do him interestingly, believe it or not, certainly in his Octavian days. I did a bit of a rethink on him a while ago, and, well, long story short, can we get this guy to play him?
Of course, even then there is still a rather large problem, which is that he’d basically be stuck in the wrong movie. He’d be surrounded by characters, such as Anthony and Cleopatra, who are so much more fun and exuberant. So I don’t think it’s that Octavian/Augustus is boring per se, necessarily, it’s more that he’s boring by comparison. A serious and somber character just gets drowned out by all the pants-on-head nuttiness around him. There’s really no space for him to breathe.
Calling Hannibal an oriental, considering that Carthage is in North Africa and Hannibal treks to Italy from Spain, is a little bit weird. (Although, yes, I know, they were originally Phoenicians from Tyre.) Also, then saying that the Egyptians are not orientals is also a bit weird, although I might agree that they’re rather more *our *orientals, as it were. But yes, sure, Hannibal is still a foreign Other.
BTW, Hannibal should demonstrate well enough that we’re entirely capable of rooting for Romans. PWII (What? We say WWI and WWII, so why not PWI and PWII?) is a complex story with plenty of ambiguousness going on, and we don’t exactly see the Carthaginians as villains. Hannibal has it in him to be a flawed and tragic hero of sorts. But there’s absolutely no way ever that the Romans are not the home team for us in that story.
In fairness, it doesn’t happen to the ancient Egyptians a lot, not nearly as much as to the Romans.
Oh, is that so? Isn’t that the clearest possible case of the winner writes the history books (/scrolls)? We know almost nothing about the real Carthage.
And that process simply extends through novels and operas and such, right into the two movies that I mentioned. They’re excellent examples, they’re Italian productions that do not hesitate to portray the Carthaginians as untrustworthy, cruel tyrants who commit human sacrifices. Also, if with the 1937 movie you are rooting for the Romans, you’re essentially rooting for mussolini. (Movie depicts politicians as idle time wasters, while beloved outsider and man of action Scipio is the only one who can clear up the swa… mess and make Rome an empire again.)
Which is, I suppose, one way to spin it. But one might want to mention that this is a war where a dude was literally awarded the title “idle time waster” as a honorific. 
Being a man of action worked out oh so not very well against Hannibal for basically anyone not called Scipio Africanus.
Too late for edit: Should I double post again? I have a thing or two to say to Mussolini. Hey, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, listen up! For one thing, for whatever weird reason, the first of your middle names there is the name of Hannibal’s dad, Hamilcar. I hadn’t actually noticed that until now, but maybe you shouldn’t be so pissy towards Carthaginians. Anyway. For another thing: There’s idle time wasting, and there’s idle time wasting. The second kind is now called Fabian strategy, and they teach it in schools. Fabius was probably the biggest hero of that war, and saved Rome’s bacon by not fighting Hannibal. And it made him super unpopular at the time, because there was no shortage of hotheads around, all too keen to rush forth with their dicks hanging out, right into another one of Hannibal’s traps. So, some respect for idle time wasting, yeah?
Actually, if there was any justice or sense in the world, Scipio should have lost at Zama, and gone down in history as another hothead who should have known better. But now suddenly being all aggressive works, and Hannibal has forgotten how to be a great tactician? Who wrote *that *plot?
I’ll help: it’s a bad thing.
Sure, why not? He likes the bridesmaid’s beard, and wears a dress. Besides, we’re putting him in the ancient world, where being bisexual doesn’t make you a pansy, at least as long as you’re the buggerer and not the buggeree.
So, Alexander: Not a pansy. Although it is another problem with him that he can easily come across as a pretty boy and a bit of a sissy. Which is weird, when you think about it, considering that he’s such a macho world conqueror. I guess it’s his oh-so pretty face.
Back to the 2004 *Alexander *again. There, he’s basically Emo Alex. Which, again, feels totally off to me. I don’t see Alexander as emo at all. He’s more the opposite of an emo. He’s every chiseled jock who ever bullied me in school, who was the star quarterback, got all the hot girls, and pushed my head into a flushing toilet. Well, that didn’t literally happen, but you know what I mean. He’s the kind of guy who I only many years later, in adulthood, might admit had some positives to him, and have an awkward conversation with, although the pain and the grudge never, ever really goes away.
When they began taping I, Claudius at the BBC, the actors complained they just couldn’t get into the roles; in other words, they didn’t know how to play them. The series’ writer, Jack Pulman, was called down to the set and said “Picture it as a Roman Mafia.” That was when everything fell into place.
I remember watching it with my older brother a year or so after I saw it in England. When Augustus pinches Tiberius’s cheek and says “There, you see? You play fair with me, I play fair with you,” my brother laughed and said “Just like the fucking Mafia!” Hit the nail on the head with that one, he did.
Pretty much the same thing happened when, in the first episode, Augustus says “They’re so clever, these Greeks! They’re always *inventing *something!” My brother laughed and said “Yeah, like backdoor sex!” I turned to him and said “After you watch a few episodes of this, you’ll realize that’s exactly what they wanted you to think.”
A lot of people hate Troy (the movie) but actually I don’t really mind it myself. The whole story has been adapted so many times, starting with Greek tragedies which are essentially spin-offs, or maybe a bit like fanfic. So this action movie version of it is as legit as any other. It’s about bloodthirsty lords fighting a lot, it doesn’t have to be highbrow.
And on top of that, look at the name of the actor playing Scipio.
I’ve seen that making-of too, but I thought it was Robert Graves, the books’ writer, who suggested that?