I'll say this for Oliver Stone: When he makes a mess, he makes a HUGE MESS. He doesn't just create trainwrecks. He knocks
the train off the rails, sets it on fire, then kills every person onboard. (And takes three hours to do it.) "Alexander" is an excessive, massive film, "spectacular" only in the sense that it features many actors making spectacles of themselves. At 175 minutes in length yet not nearly deep enough to justify such extremes, it reeks with pretension. It is, to put it bluntly, a bad movie, certainly Stone's worst. Alexander the Great, a Macedonian king and conqueror, died in 323 B.C. Whatever else you didn't know about him is told to us by Ptolemy (played in old age by Anthony Hopkins), dictating Greek history to dutiful scribes some years later. Ptolemy is not a particularly interesting history professor, given as he is to vague philosophical-sounding intonations about the greatness of Mr. The Great, but that doesn't stop Stone from using him as a narrator throughout the film, both on screen and in voice-over.
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