"Alexander the Great" is a film released in 2004 directed by Oliver Stone and starring Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Farrell, Val Kilmer and Jared Leto.In my opinion, Oliver Stone's movie, Alexander was a 3-hour waste of time if you were watching it for entertainment purposes. The characters lacked depth, Colin Farrell's blonde do was very strange and the whole movie moved too slowly. Giant leaps were made with no explanations, battle scenes weren't particularly entertaining and the whole movie was utterly boring. On the other hand the movie was completely all true historically apart from one or two small things and I learnt a lot from it. Oliver Stone even consulted an Oxford professor of history: Robin Lane Fox to help with making his movie.Alexander the movie was actually quite educational. Because Oliver Stone's attitude towards Alexander was slightly ambivalent but on the whole pretty positive, his movie was a bit biased.For people in history and today the life of Alexander has a legendary, heroic quality to it. But Alexander was autocratic and at times cruel, and his armies killed thousands upon thousands. Oliver Stone slightly glorifies Alexander without regard to the less admirable aspects of him (like the death of his cousin and political rival, Amyntas). Military conquest of thousands of 'barbarian' peoples and lands was widely considered glorious. If people surrendered to Alexander, they were spared and their leaders were often reinstated. Often, he himself was received as a 'liberator,' replacing a Persian Empire, which was not exactly loved by one and all. When he sacked whole cities who opposed him - Thebes or Tyre - his ruthlessness shocks us, but it was not outside the conduct of war by other contemporaries: his father Philip and other Greek cities in the past had done the same. In India when he arrived, Indian chiefs were fighting one another, or were bitter enemies. When he left, these internal wars were ended - at least until his unexpected early death.Historians who find unprovoked war and killing distasteful cast Alexander as murderous, savage and barbaric. In history, Alexander was credited with taming or civilizing barbarian peoples. He even made the two nobilities (Macedonian and Persian) inter-marry. Alexander was not racist at all. He wanted to include conquered peoples in his new kingdom; if kings surrendered to him he allowed them to keep their sovereignty. Oliver's film credits Alexander with these achievements. But through his friends, fellow-officers, and Ptolemy himself, it also gives us the viewpoints of those who disbelieved him. In real life, Alexander drank much and often, he killed indiscriminately and he had a taste for war. Oliver's film shows all these sides even though he tends to favour the good sides of Alexander more.Before watching Alexander I knew almost nothing about Alexander, only that he was a famous Greek king who lived a long time ago and nearly conquered the whole world. After watching...
