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Alexander review
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A waste of time.

"Conquer your fear, and I promise you, you will conquer death."

If you're enthusiastic to waste 3 valuable hours on Oliver Stone's tedious, meaningless, lackluster epic then I won't stop you. But the fact remains that Alexander is a substantially appalling film that should never plague your DVD player.

Before continuing with this review, I must clear up a few things: Oliver Stone is a talented filmmaker. Stone's films for the most part have been masterpieces of the utmost quality, and epics like this are ordinarily excellent...but there is nothing here that engages you and consequently the result is 3 hours of an uninspiring script accompanied with barely any action.

It appears that every single actor is miscast: Colin Farrell breathes no life into the character of Alexander (who's turned into a sexually frustrated arrogant king who spends half the film naked), while Jolie adds absolutely nothing but useless dialogue scenes of philosophizing. And every other addition to the cast does nothing more but talk or get killed; no distinguishing features, and a non-sentimental approach to the whole thing.

And even the battle scenes, the only thing you would think would be redeeming, look dull and lifeless and were shot in a manner that results in the audience having no clue as to what is going on. The shaky cam was fruitless, distracting and all it did was cause the audience to sit there thinking "What...the hell...is going on?!" And if that's not enough, why in the name of god did the post-production crew decide to tint part of a battle in red?! You can't make out ANYTHING! I was struggling just to distinguish who is stabbing who.

There was no point to the movie. All it does is try to outline the life of Alexander the Great (played appallingly by Farrell) but instead the dismal script is hard to comprehend and makes it into something from Shakespeare. After watching the movie I had no idea what point it was meant to make, not to mention what actually happened during the movie, and why it's nothing more than violent manslaughter with horrible acting and a script that could be beaten by one penned by a 5-year-old.

Alexander's life was filled with battles of epic proportion and that is what I was at least expecting. Stone never got close to this. When I first saw the trailers and read the information about the movie I expected good results. All the film returned was a bunch of negative reviews and a poor box office return.

Alexander is the first Oliver Stone film one can honestly describe as boring. Please do yourself a favour and leave this one on the shelf! Don't waste your precious time.

2/10
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Added by PvtCaboose91
16 years ago on 28 April 2008 07:05

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