Alexander

Well, I just got back from seeing Alexander. I guess that reading so many negative reviews lowered my expectations enough that…I thought it wasn’t so bad. There were serious groaners, to be true, and the political messages were a bit preachy, but I thought it was a whole lot better than the reviews. I also wonder whether I might have seen a different movie from the one that the usually quite spot on Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post saw. For example, Hunter wrote,

Alexander’s great love was said to be Hephaistion, who is played in the film by Jared Leto, but unless you know Jared Leto by face, even late in the movie you’ll have no idea which one he was. I thought he was this other guy, equally handsome, equally vapid, equally unmemorable, whom Alexander prongs with a spear in a drunken rage late in the movie. But that was some other guy.

It was obvious from the getgo who Hephaistion was. How could that have been in doubt? (There were a couple of moony scenes between Alexander and his lifelong friend, but Stone insisted that they be all moony and the only sex scenes are heterosexual and pretty rough.)

All in all, Alexander is worth seeing, despite three hours and the rather boring narration by Anthony Hopkins as a rather tediously garrulous Ptolemy of Egypt. (And….what Macedonian warriors wore eye liner? Where did Oliver Stone get that idea?)