FILM HISTORY
Alexander(2004)
ALEXANDERis a product of director Oliver Stone’s
lifelong fascination with Alexander, the king of
Macedonia who conquered the Persian Empire in the
fourth centuryB.C.E. and initiated the Hellenistic era.
Stone’s epic film cost $150 million, which resulted in an
elaborate and often visually beautiful film. Narrated by
theagingPtolemy(AnthonyHopkins),Alexander’s
Macedonian general who took control of Egypt after
his death, the film tells the life of Alexander (Colin
Farrell) through an intermix of battle scenes, scenes
showing the progress of Alexander and his army
through the Middle East and India, and flashbacks to
his early years. Stone portrays Alexander’s relationship
with his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), as
instrumental in his early development while also
focusing on his rocky relationship with his father, King
Philip II (Val Kilmer). The movie elaborates on the
major battle at Gaugamela in 331B.C.E., where the
Persian leader Darius is forced to flee, and then follows
Alexander as he conquers the rest of the Persian
Empire and continues east into India. After his troops
begin to mutiny, Alexander finally returns to the
Persian capital of Babylon, where he dies on June 10,
323 B.C.E.
The enormous amount of money spent on the film
enabled Stone to achieve a stunning visual spectacle,
but as history, the film leaves much to be desired. The
character of Alexander is never developed in depth. He
is shown at times as a weak character who is plagued by
doubts over his own decisions and often seems
obsessed with his desire for glory. Alexander is also
portrayed as an idealistic leader who believed that the
people he conquered wanted change, that he was
“freeing the people of the world,” and that Asia and
Europe would grow together into a single community.
But was Alexander an idealistic dreamer, as Stone
apparently believes, or was he a military leader who,
following the dictum that “fortune favors the bold,” ran
roughshod over the wishes of his soldiers in order to
follow his dream and was responsible for mass slaughter
in the process? The latter is a perspective that Stone
glosses over, but Ptolemy probably expresses the morerealistic notion that “none of us believed in his dream.”
The movie also does not elaborate on Alexander’s wish
to be a god. Certainly, Alexander aspired to divine
honors; at one point he sent instructions to the Greek
cities to “vote him a god.” Stone’s portrayal of Alexander
is perhaps most realistic in presenting Alexander’s
drinking binges and his bisexuality, which was common
in the Greco-Roman world. His marriage to Roxane
(Rosario Dawson), daughter of a Bactrian noble, is
shown, as well as his love for his lifelong companion
Hephaestion ( Jared Leto) and his sexual relationship
with the Persian male slave Bagoas (Francisco Bosch).The film contains a number of inaccurate historical
details. Alexander’s first encounters with the Persian
royal princesses and Bagoas did not occur when he
entered Babylon for the first time. Alexander did not kill
Cleitas in India, and he was not wounded in India at the
Battle of the Hydaspes River but at the siege of Malli.
Specialists in Persian history have also argued that
Persian military forces were much more disciplined than
they are depicted in the movie.Alexander (Colin Farrell) on his horse Bucephalus, reviewing the
troops before the Battle of Gaugamela.Warner Bros/Jaap Buitendijk/The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NYMacedonia and the Conquests of Alexander 79Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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