Alexander leaves the big screen in a few days and I caught it at one of the last showings. I was pleasantly surprised. The reviews were so awful that my expectations couldn’t go much lower, but even keeping that in mind I think the film was very, very good. In fact, now that I’ve seen it, a lot of the criticism looks pretty groundless.

For starters, it was beautiful yet realistic. The Macedonian phalanxes were not too clean yet not too scruffy. The landscapes were real, making you feel like you were in Macedonia, Persia, Central Asia, India, or Egypt—an appreciated art when most movie directors think the audience can’t tell the difference (witness “Cuba” filmed in the Philippines in Thirteen Days, “Vietnam” filmed in Morocco in Spy Games, etc etc). Plus, the acting was pretty good.

For a movie, the history was stunningly accurate. From Alexander’s struggles to keep control of his army, to his homosexuality, to his possible poisoning at the hands of his generals, to his romantic attachment to Persian culture, both the big picture and the smaller details are done remarkably well. With no remaining documents from the period, Alexander is portrayed either as a utopian uniter of the human race or a genocidal Hitler-Stalin figure. Director Oliver Stone leans hard towards the former.

In fact, Alexander probably tops Troy (which I really enjoyed) and certainly Gladiator. I was never a fan of Gladiator, mainly because with the lone exception of the opening battle against the Germanic barbarians, the scenary and backdrop were “too beautiful” (and thus unbelievable), and most gallingly, the damn thing wasn’t even an attempt at real history. At least Troy didn’t stray far from its part-mythical, part-historical literary roots. Gladiatorjust followed romantic but illusory notions of the glorious Roman republic, underminded by a tyrant, and saved by a general-turned-gladiator-slave, with practically no basis in history. (But I don’t speak for the majority when it comes to reviewing movies: Gladiatorwon an Academy Award for best picture for the year 2000, and Alexander has been eviscerated by the critics.)

In closing, it’s worth noting that I’m not a fan of director Oliver Stone. I thought both JFK and Nixon were the most dreadful conspiracy-mongering rubbish I could think of, not to mention Natural Born Killers and Stone’s inexplicable fascination with Fidel Castro. But Alexander was something else, and I recommend it for anyone who has had second thoughts about seeing the film.

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