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Oliver Stone, The Pussy
Posted by: null on Oct 13, 2005 | This weekend I watched Alexander and I can say after sitting through the directors cut of this film that everyone who has said that Oliver Stone is a good writer / director needs to be summarily executed. He may have been a great Hollywood icon at one point, but I think the time has come to have him bronzed and placed in a museum somewhere so that his directorial achievements won't be overshadowed by cinematic catastrophes like this film.
I had heard previously that this film wasn't supposed to be very good, but since this was a film about Alexander the Great, one of the greatest military tacticians in all of history, I did expect one thing, for there to be some great battle scenes. Out of the three hours of my life that this film drained from me, there was only about fifteen minutes of action in the entire film. Now as I said, I wasn't expecting much, but for a film that is about a man who spent nearly his entire adult life engaged in a military campaign there'd think that there would be more than two battles in the film and that they'd actually be good. Well, you'd be fucking wrong.
The first battle sequence depicted is when Alexander defeated the king of Persia was preceded by Alexander discussing the strategy that was to be used to defeat the Persians. Instead of explaining the strategy the scene just revolved around Alexander bickering with his generals about the validity of his plan. I personally couldn't blame the other generals for questioning Alexander because if he had gave the kind of piss weak explanation that was given in the film as to what was going on I wouldn't have wanted to fight either. The battle scene that followed was the most confusing one I have ever seen, and I actually knew what Alexander's strategy was because since I had seen a special on the History channel about this very battle. Apparently, it's more important to Oliver Stone to throw dirt everywhere then it is to lend people a clue as to what's going on as the entire scene appears to have been shot in the heart of a tornado. I was expecting a house to land on Colin Farell and for the Persian King to take his ruby slippers, but it turned out that Colin Farell avoided the house and then threw something at him that wasn't able to be distinguished through the dirt (possibly an empty bottle of gin) and the Persian King got scared and sped away on some sort of conveyance that resembled a dog sled.
The only other battle scene in the film wasn't much better. Instead of obscuring everything with dirt trees were used instead as the camera men tossed their cameras back and forth between them and pointed them in random directions. I can't tell you much about what was really going on except that there were elephants and Alexander gets shot by an arrow. At this point someone tripped over a cable and all the cameras lost their blue and green pallets.
The rest of the film consists of Stone struggling to create plot points in the film besides Alexander military achievements and failing miserably at it through a series of pointless flashbacks that have nothing to do with the progression of the story. The film starts off simply enough with Alexander childhood and then spirals directly into a bottomless pit of stupidity, never to emerge again. We're skipped forward in time to the first battle of the film and treated to a brief voice over as to what happened between the period of Alexander becoming king of Macedonia and right before he conquers Persia. So basically they glossed over in one paragraph nearly everything that made Alexander, Alexander the Great. Conquering Egypt? Founding of Alexandria and building of Historic monuments? Fuck it. None of that shit is important, lets cut all of that out so we can include all of these boring scenes of Alexander's mother dictating letters that don't have anything to do with furthering the plot so we can give Angelia Jolie more screen time.
Aside from Stone proving that he can't write a script for a story that was already written for him, he also proved that he is a giant pussy. That's right, Oliver Stone is a mammoth gaping vagina. It was clear that Stone originally intended to make it a point that Alexander the Great was homosexual (or more precisely bisexual). In this regard he couldn't have pussed out more. There was plenty of suggestion to Alexander's love affair with another man, but it was so played down that it might as well been cut out completely. Don't get me wrong, I in no way wanted to see Colin Farell hammering away in some guy's ass, but the way History tells it Alexander the Great was a big fat homo and during that time in History homosexuality was a normal thing. It wasn't until the Catholic Church told everyone that everything sexual was taboo for 1500 years that homosexuality became an incarnation of Satan himself. Stone is enough of a big shot that to have enough creative license to put anything he wanted into his film. He could have had a scene where Colin Farell fucking his horse and gotten away with it, yet the scene where Alexander and his lover kissed was cut entirely from the film, even in the director's cut. I'm sure this was taken out under pressure from people worried the film was too gay their box office revenues would be effected. And like a pathetic sissy girl scout Stone caved into the pressure like a fat guy at the bottom of the Marinas trench.
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