Amongst the viewers who will see Alexander, there will be some who choose to view it because they like good old fashioned sword and sandal epics, and then there will be those who go simply because it is directed by Oliver Stone. I'm not sure if either audience denomination will walk away satisfied, but at least the latter will be able to recognize the film's attributes for what they are. These attributes may be the very elements of the film that make the other half of the theater wish they'd stayed home and rented Troy instead. Me, I'm an Oliver Stone fan, and I'm also the kind of filmgoer who will appreciate a misfire from a great filmmaker more than a perfectly competent effort from a by-the-numbers director. Alexander is not one of his Stone's best films; you may not even think it's one of his good films; but it's definitely one of his films.

This is the life story of the man who conquered most of the known world in the third century BC and paved the way for the Roman Empire. Stone's retrospective is meant to demythicize Alexander: he even opens the film with an obvious nod to Citizen Kane, as a dying breath is heard and a limp hand falls into frame, releasing a red signet ring (in place of the famous snowglobe) that falls in slow motion to the floor. Jumping forward a number of years to Egypt, we find an aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) narrating the story of Alexander while his faithful scribe puts his words down on paper. Guided by his narration, we traverse back to Macedonia (a series of rather annoying titles at the bottom of the screen let us know, all too frequently, where we are and what year it is), where the young boy Alexander is raised by his mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie), taught by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) and chastened by his father Phillip (Val Kilmer), the king of Macedonia and would-be conqueror of Persia. The one legend about Alexander that everyone knows occurs with satisfactory bombast: as a boy, he tamed the wild horse Bucephalus, and in the film it is a scene of great personal triumph, in which he gains the respect of his hard-loving father.

Stone spends a good deal of time on Alexander's upbringing, particularly regarding his relationship with his Dionysus-worshipping mother. Olympia is not on good terms with King Phillip, and is afraid that her son will not be named as successor to the throne. Jolie, chomping up the scenery with a vampiric accent and eyes afire, seems to be playing the ancient, lusty antecedent of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate, maneuvering her son into a position of power and being so sexy in the process that it's no wonder Alexander grows up with some Oedipal issues with her. Phillip, meanwhile, takes Alexander into ancient catacombs lined with paintings of the heroes of old in their most terrible moments: Hercules murdering his children, Prometheus being eaten by the vulture, Medea stabbing her babies in defiance of Jason. These cave murals will appear many times throughout the film, in a blatantly prophetic sense.

The film then abruptly leaps forward again; Phillip is dead, and Alexander, now fully grown and played by Colin Farrell, is leading the Macedonian armies against the Persian hordes. How did this happen, exactly? Ptolemy provides a narrative hinge so thrifty that you just have to accept the progression in the little time you have before the battle begins and the score (by eighties mainstay Vangelis) swells heroically and Alexander triumphs against great odds. We've seen our fair share of epic historical battles in the past few years, and while this one is fairly exciting, it's nothing terribly new. I don't think Stone is all that interested in it, either. He chooses some interesting angles, and films the action with suitable aplomb, but one senses that his heart and mind are elsewhere.

He does get one great touch in before the action. It's been a great cliche in drama, ever since Shakespeare wrote Henry V, that before every major battle, the commander has to give a rousing speech that will inspire his troops and hopefully the audience as well. That latter aspect is harder to do these days, and rather than succumb to cliche, Stone actually wanders away from Alexander's speech just as he's hitting his stride; his camera soars across the battlefield until it finds the Persian commander, doing exactly the same thing in his native tongue. It's a nice subversion of the expected. And then the fighting begins.

This triumph, which puts Alexander on the throne in Babylon, is the first of many in the eight years he spent conquering the East, establishing cities in his name wherever he went and extending the Kingdom of Macedonia so far beyond its own shores that it really ceased to be Macedonia at all. At the end of it all, he died, reportedly of high fever. But this is an Oliver Stone film, and according to him, no great and controversial leader ever dies simply of high fever. There are many factions that rise up against him from his own ranks, and by the time he leads his weary men towards India, mutiny and dissent is beginning to rum rampant. Many resent Alexander's adoption of Asian culture and his taking a Babylonian dancer, Roxane (Rosario Dawson) as his bride -- his mother certainly frowns upon that, which gives Alexander some degree of satisfaction. An early assassination attempt fails; eventually, we learn that Phillip himself was murdered, purportedly (but not likely) by Easterners, and it seems that Alexander is destined to join him in the ranks of those whose great vision met their downfall at the hands of men with smaller minds.

In writing this summary of the film and recounting the events in my memory, I find myself getting caught up in and thrilled by the story more than I did when I actually was watching the film. Memory has an interesting process of distilling the ineffective and useless, and if I think back more carefully, I recall a film that lurches about and rarely communicates with precision. I don't expect subtlety from Stone, by any means, but he's usually more effective in combining his rambling hyperkinetics into a whole that's at least the equal of the sum of its parts. There are good parts here, and even more good intentions, but it isn't until the last act that Stone's vision catches up with his style and the film becomes his own. This occurs at a pivotal moment in the film's second major battle scene, which takes place in India and pits the Macedonians against an army of charging elephants. Again, it's something we've seen before (well, sort of -- do the mythological elephants in The Return Of The King count?) but halfway through the conflict Stone radically alters the scene's color palette, sound design and system of montage, turning the battle into a breathtaking hallucinatory pink swirl, reminiscent of the nightmarish imagery he employed so well in Natural Born Killers. From this point on, the film remains firmly within its director's grasp, and it works. Unfortunately, it only has about forty minutes left.

Stone wants to uncover the man behind the legend with this film, take him down to a personal level, and perhaps part of the problem is that the legend is never clear. I mentioned the Citizen Kane reference at the beginning of the film; you will recall that in, in that film, Kane's death was followed by a newsreel recounting his entire life as the public knew it. This served as a template which the rest of the film could play against, explore and counter. I think Stone would have done well to include a similar device; it would have saved valuable time spent on exposition later on, and allowed Stone to develop Alexander's character more fully. His vision of the man is so unclear: Alexander's drive to conquer and reign is rooted in his conflict with his parents, but what is that conflict, exactly? Does he want to impress his father vicariously? Avenge him? Impress his mother? Wriggle out from under her influence? All of the above, probably, but that's just a guess.

In Farrell, this confluence of conflicts at least seems understandable; he brings Alexander to a human level far more effectively than the script does; what we understand about the character is largely due to his performance. And it's of course worth noting that this is the second film he's been in this year that has handled issues of sexuality in a refreshingly progressive sense: like his character in A Home At The End Of The World, Alexander does not differentiate between genders as objects of lust and love. It's stated from the very beginning that the love of his life is his boyhood friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto); this is presented not with fanfare or an eye for controversy but simply as fact; as it should be. Alexander is not a preening queen, but simply a man who loves another person who happens to be a man. It's true that their physical love, while often referred to, is never shown, but this is at least a step in a good direction. And while Roxane, whom Alexander marries so that he can have an heir, does get to be the subject of the film's one sex scene, it's Hephaistion who gets the (cheesy) tearful deathbed farewell scene.

Leto does most of his acting with his glassy eyes, but he does well when he needs to; Dawson, on the other hand, exists in the film purely as an object of lust (for Alexander and the audience, and I'm not exactly complaining here) and doesn't get much of a chance to impress with anything other than her supremely good looks. The rest of the cast fares more or less the same. Hopkins has the poor luck of delivering a good performance in a series of useless scenes. Jolie alternates between being seductively scary and so over the top that she might as well be playing one of the Greek gods in an old Harryhausen film; she's fun to watch, and I guess her presence works, but maybe she should have toned her hair down a bit. Other notable names like Brian Blessed, Plummer and Jonathan Rhys Meyers come and go in roles no more than cameos. Kilmer's role is only slightly greater than those, but he leaves perhaps the greatest impact; he gives Phillip a great blustery pathos, and in just a few scenes turns him into a real person, rather than a stereotypical gruff father figure; he's the precursor to his son's vision and passion, but not his drive.

Stone's own relationship with his parents was one of great tumult, and I imagine that worked its way into the movie as much as his political obsessions. Perhaps this would have worked better as a smaller, more intimate film; but then, how do you make an intimate film about a man who did the things Alexander did? Stone never quite manages to merge the epic and the intimate, and the result is an unwieldy bit of history that calls to mind another unsuccessful-yet-fascinating work from another great filmmaker: Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. Like Scorsese and his history with that film, Stone has been wanting to make an Alexander film since the beginning of his career, and I think maybe the decades of preparation may have left him simply incapable of making a clear and concise picture (Scorsese, luckily, had the benefit of an actor of the magnitude of Daniel Day Lewis and a more immediate sense of historical relevance to buoy his equally sagging epic). It's not necessarily boring, but it only rarely springs to life. Those moments won't be enough for the majority of audiences, but admirers of Oliver Stone will eat them up. And because it is, after all, an Oliver Stone film, they will find the parts which are not successful just as fascinating, for an entirely different reason. One never wants to see a great filmmaker be unsuccessful in their efforts, but when they are, the results are worth watching just as much as their masterpieces. Alexander is no masterpiece, and I can only recommend it with reservations; but I know I'll remember it, and years from now, it'll probably occupy a space on my shelf next to Stone's other, better films.