I came to "Alexander" as a secular devotee of Victor Davis Hanson and therefore as a man convinced that Alexander was not only Great, but the greatest man who ever lived. The first edition of Michael H. Hart's "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History" ranks Alexander 33rd, below the founders of the world's major religions but ahead of every American President except George Washington. As macresarf1 pointed out in his magnificent review of this film, empire building is really more a theme of Western than Eastern civilization, and Alexander was not only the first Western empire builder; he was the man who set the tone for all future contacts between the West and the non-West (specifically, the West conquers the non-West). Even if every European nation-state hadn't spent most of the last 350 years imitating Alexander in this respect, he would still be worth remembering just for the fact that when Rome first opened its eyes to the world beyond Italy, two-thirds of that world spoke Greek as a first language. Indeed if you set the history of contemporary America down alongside that of the Roman Republic, Alexander appears almost the same number of years into Rome's Republican period as Hitler does into our own Republic. Kind of makes you wonder why the Romans didn't set up some kind of Lend-Lease deal with the Persians. Did they think Greeks wanted nothing to do with such a down-market neighborhood as Italy? (Hitler by the way was 35th on Hart's original list.)

I have put myself through enough overlong historical epics that I kind of liked this one, but before I try to justify this quirk of my personality you all will be expecting what every other writer has provided, a laundry list of the movie's failures. The first mistake is that all the male Greeks (except for Aristotle, played by Christopher Plummer, and Ptolemy, played by Anthony Hopkins as an old man telling Alexander's story) speak with some vaguely Celtic accent, either Irish or Scottish. The females' accents vary; it's hard to place Olympias (Angelina Jolie), Alexander's mother. When we first see her, Alexander is 3 and she's teaching him how to handle snakes, this being a good run-up to learning how to handle people in her opinion. As if the audience wasn't uncomfortable enough with the spectacle of a 3-year-old playing with snakes, Olympias' husband Phillip (Val Kilmer), King of Macedonia, bursts in and rapes her. A few years later, Phillip, again drunk, attempts to impart to his son the wisdom he will need to be king, but winds up floundering in self-pity. Moved, the 11-year-old Alexander walks up and takes his father's hand.

As I whispered to my date, "With parents like these, no wonder he tried to kill everybody he came across." But this is being too hard on Alexander. He actually kills only three of his close companions: Philotus, Parmelion and Cleitus. Of course, if we forgive him these we will also have to forgive Olympias for whacking Phillip, which I don't think we should do, as Alexander would have gone into Asia as nothing more than a crown prince yoked to his father's strategy had Phillip lived. Many more Persians, Bactrians and Indians (if not Greeks!) would have lived too in that event.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the movie's mistakes. While we're on about people Alexander killed, the philosopher Calisthenes, inventor of calisthenics and another favorite of Alexander's who accompanied him into Asia, was killed by him for no good reason. Yet this character is completely absent from the film. In the movie Alexander has many associates but only one favorite: Hephastion (Jared Leto), who gives him a little Egyptian trinket of a ring the night before the battle of Gaugamela, where Alexander destroys a Persian army six times the size of his (at least according to Ptolemy). This ring becomes the symbol of Alexander's rule. It eventually winds up on Ptolemy's finger even though he only rules Egypt.

Hephastion and Alexander are pretty obviously lovers. This put a great number of people off the film, but I kind of liked the way Stone made a love triangle out of Alexander, Hephastion and Alexander's Bactrian bride Roxana (didn't catch the actress' name). In fact, Roxana is so disgusted at the revelation of Alexander's love for Hephastion that she resolves to kill him rather than submit to his advances, but in a naked (yowza!) ripoff of "Troy," she finds she can put the knife up against his throat, but not cut it. Alexander, like his hero Achilles in that film, is kind of tired of it all and puts up no resistance at the moment she is about to kill him, then makes love to her as a (sort of) way of saying "Thanks for not killing me." I whispered to my date at this point, "My fantasies are nowhere near this kinky." OK, maybe they are. That's for another review.

It's impossible to find a Western historical figure macresarf1 didn't compare Alexander to in his review, but not impossible to find a movie. Alexander's mission at first is to conquer Persia and after Gaugamela, he walks into their capital, Babylon, without a fight. (Babylon is almost too grand. Two thousand years later, in the late seventeenth century, there was still no Western city so magnificent as Babylon is depicted in this film. But I didn't complain about how good Troy looked in that movie, so I better shut up.) Then Alexander insists that until he has killed the fugitive Persian king Darius, he is only "the king of air." So they spend a couple of years chasing the whole Greek army after Darius into what is now Afghanistan, until Darius is himself killed by his lieutenants, in a desperate bid to stop Alexander's relentless pursuit. However, this backfires and only makes him more determined to kill each of the backstabbing warlords.

After he has done THAT, Alexander marries Roxana and keeps forging eastward into the Hindu Kush mountains. He tells his lieutenant Ptolemy that soon, they will reach the shores of the "Outer Ocean" and realize Aristotle's dream of sailing from there up the Nile (believed for some reason to be a channel separating Africa into two continents) and directly back to Greece. He isn't really interested in conquering at this point as much as he is in exploring. Or more accurately, the conquering and the exploring are inseparable. It was at this point it occurred to me where I had seen this before: "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." Alexander is not Robert the Bruce or Spartacus; he is a conquistador. And he has descended into a kind of madness. (See, I told you this movie was really worth it.)

Things go downhill from here, topographically, politically and militarily. Alexander gets most of the way through India before his troops realize that although he knows WHAT he's doing, he no longer knows why, nor does he give a flying f---. A "mutiny" occurs at which the troops call Alexander on his shifting rationales for the continuing war; he has a few no-names among them killed; the close companions have already seen him off three of their number and know better than to push him too far. By this point, my date's perfume was giving me a splitting headache and I was closing my eyes and hoping the movie would end soon. But of course that's not the movie's fault.

Then at the movie's climax, Alexander meets. . .his match? Hart and most other historians insist that Alexander never lost a major battle, but he has to be CARRIED from the field where the Indians put an arrow in him, Hephastion is maimed, his beloved horse Bucephelas dies, and other horses imitate the Greeks in their reluctance to charge into battle. At any rate, Stone has created a battle scene with elephants which are regular sized but do a hell of a lot better than the ultra-huge ones in "Return of the King" against horse cavalry. (In fact as I watched it it seemed he might have used African elephants where he should have used Asian, but this is a minor problem.) It's sort of like comparing the riverine warfare sequence in "A Bridge Too Far" with the one in "Streetfighter." This is what that s--- actually looked like, as far as anyone can tell at this remove. Worth the price of admission for this sequence alone.

Anyway, reminded of his mortality, Alexander loses his zest for battle and agrees to march west again at least as far as Babylon. While he's there Hephastion dies. Only now, unlike when we were first informed Phillip was assassinated, the plot has been thickened by the revelation to the audience of the crucial story of exactly how Phillip met his death. Of course most moviegoers could tell already that Olympias, if not Alexander himself, was behind Phillip's assassination. He roused the troops by telling them it was the Persians. ("Don't forget, this is the guy that tried to kill my dad.") As his mother had her husband and rival for Alexander's loyalty killed, Alexander now figures Roxana must be the culprit in Hephastion's death, and is on the point of killing her when she reveals she is pregnant, leading him to spare her life. Unfortunately, Alexander doesn't live to see his son born, but dies after one last night of drunken revelry, leaving the question "Was he poisoned?" hanging. (Even 40 years later, the old Ptolemy is afraid to touch this one, telling the scribe, "Write only, 'He died after a brief illness'.")

The history of the world from Alexander on is the history of six great periods of Westernization by force. The first was Alexander himself; the second was the Roman Empire; the third was the Crusades; the fourth was the settlement of the New World; the fifth was the nineteenth-century scramble for Asia and Africa. The sixth, the renewed Crusades, began on September 11, 2001. Identify the individual in each case who was most responsible for the bloodletting and you have identified the six most important people in human history. I believe this and yet I find some reason to keep getting up each morning! It's as much because of good movies as anything else. And the fact I decided to go on another date with April as long as she wears some other perfume.

Recommended: Yes