« Rap Lyrics of the Month | Main | Can one blogger drive a story? »
December 06, 2004
Alexander was not just mediocre
In general, I would say that Hollywood's focus on Greece and Rome is extremely ethnocentric, but I decided to see "Alexander" anyways. From the headlines of most reviews, I was dreading "Alexander the mediocre" or "Alexander the not so great" maybe even "Alexander the horrible" but I think Stone did a decent job, trying to reveal what drove Alexander the Great, and how he conquered the known world. I thought it was a much better movie than Troy from earlier this year.
A few weeks ago I saw an Alexander the Great special on the History Channel, so I was expecting to see a lot of inaccuracies. Other than the timing or circumstances of the executions of his men, or some of the details about Alexander's last battle, I didn't find much wrong. The historical record is far from complete, so you can grant Stone some license to try to fill in the detail. I thought Stone did a great job showing the key battle scene. I also learned several new things the History Channel left out, like the deadly trip through the desert back to Babylon, the extent of the struggle for power after his death, or the fact that his only son was murdered by Macedonians.
More than the accounting of events, what you get out of the movie is a sense of how Alexander did it, and why. First, you have to get past the gay lust subtext, which is apparently accurate, but which I think Stone just put in there to say "Here is something you can't understand" and drive home the point that it was a different age. Clearly, he overdid it, but the only sex scene in the movie is with Rosario Dawson whose breasts you will not forget nor want to forget. A lot of reviewers probably never got past all the furtive glances between Alexander and different male companions. Some said as much.
If you could get past that to the heart of the story though, what you got was Stone's justification for conquest. Alexander had a vision of a "free" world without servants, where East and West were brought together by commerce, travel, and education. While he was surrounded and raised by racist Greeks, Stone portrays Alexander as a man with respect for all people (but patience for none). At one point his leading officers discouraged him from taking an Asian bride, and he demands to know how they can judge their own world superior when these new civilizations they are finding are thousands of years old.
Ultimately, it is hard to sympathize with Alexander, or see him as less than the tyrant he was. But at the same time, you have to acknowledge that he was a great man, and the movie does a good job of explaining why, even if it misses a few key points here and there. As the narrator says in the end, Alexander was a man with vision who had great dreams and changed the world forever. "Alexander" shows it.
Posted by Mike at December 6, 2004 09:02 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/556
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)