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Alexander

Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 42 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 147 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Adventure | Drama | War
Written by:
Oliver Stone
Christopher Kyle
Laeta Kalogridis
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 24, 2004
DVD: August 2, 2005
Running Time: 173 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / UK / Germany / Netherlands
Summary
RATING: R for violence and some sexuality/nudity
Starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Christopher Plummer, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Based on the true story of one of history's most luminous and influential leaders, Alexander takes a bold, honest look at Alexander's life and his relationships. (Warner Bros.)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Any Given Sunday Born on the Fourth of July JFK Natural Born Killers Nixon The Doors U Turn Wall Street World Trade Center
GAMES: Alexander (PC)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It's boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson and chock-full of extravagantly brutal battle sequences.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and -- to paraphrase our Ptolemy -- its failings are greater than most films’ successes.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
If, as the Virgil quote that starts the film claims, fortune favors the bold, Alexander has not been nearly bold enough.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
What Alexander lacks in narrative clarity, it makes up for with pomp and pageantry.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
The creators of Alexander set out to make an epic, and they can't be faulted for the many elements that succeed on this scale; what's unfortunate is that they don't quite deliver a camp classic.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Since the movie lacks a vision of what Alexander was really about as a man and a figure in history, it falls back all too frequently on movie spectacle.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
At best an honorable failure, an intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
By de-mythologizing Alexander, Stone has turned him into an unbelievable individual. We accept great deeds from great people, not from sniveling whiners.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
What Stone has delivered instead is no folie de grandeur, but rather the last thing one would have expected from him: an honorable failure.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Despite a three-hour running time Stone is too occupied with psychodrama to explore Alexander's innovations in battle, and Farrell, clearly out of his depth, seems less a leader of men than a Hellenistic James Dean.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
[Stone] gives us provocative notes and sketches but not a final draft. The film doesn't feel at ease with itself. It says too much, and yet leaves too much unsaid.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Call it "Alexander the Grate," because, over the marathon of its three-hour running time, this wonky epic really does get on your nerves.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Farrell plays all this as if he means it, but he seems slight in the role and without great physical presence. In a scene in which Alexander is roaring at his troops to rouse them to battle, he sounds like Mighty Mouse pretending to be Superman.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
There are two stunning battle sequences, and that rose-tinted bloodbath is a stroke of the eccentric genius for which Stone is famous.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Enjoyable in some places, but dreadful in others. It's boring here and exciting there. And it's almost always goofy.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The happy couple (Farrell/Dawson) do enjoy one great scene together, and it's the high point of the movie-a naked tussle, in which she puts a knife to his throat. The whole sequence is quick, funny, and arousing, in sharp contrast to the rest of Alexander, which is sluggish, unsmiling.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
A movie that has neither dramatic focus nor a single memorable performance, aside from one or two that are memorable for the wrong reasons?
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
As huge a travesty and a bore as 1956's "Alexander the Great," in which Richard Burton looked equally uncomfortable as a blond.
Read Full Review >Premiere Peter Debruge
An ambitious disaster, Alexander is the rare historical portrait that leaves you feeling as though you know less about its subject than you did upon entering the theater.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
A dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
After the three hours--though it seemed longer--I was still bewildered. Stone is a unique and fiery talent. Why did he make this film?
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Michael Atkinson
Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Merle Bertrand
A movie celebrating the life of the greatest military conqueror the world has ever known should feature a bit more conquering.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
There's no zest to the general depravity, no coherence to the script or the spectacle -- clarity is missing in some of the camera work -- and, most important, no character to give a Greek fig about.
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Alexander breaks the key rule that makes movies move: Show, don't tell.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
This movie is an act of hubris so huge that, in Alexander's time, it would draw lightning bolts from contemptuous gods. Today it will get sniggers from stunned critics and a collective yawn from a public unlikely to share Stone's egomania.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
It is, in a word, boring, and that's the most un-Oliver Stone adjective I can think of.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.4 (out of 10) based on 147 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Steve C. gave it a0:
Don't gimme any of this "you have to pay attention" or "you have to enjoy history" garbage. I love history, but even if I overdosed on adderall, I could not offer my attention to this movie. This marked the first time I could not finish a movie. I tried on two separate occasions and both times it took less than an hour before I realized there are so many better things I could be doing and shut it off.
[Anonymous] gave it a6:
If this movie was confusing you obviously don't appreciate history enough to seen nor is it the care or you just weren't paying attention. This movie was not the best I have ever seen nor is it the worst. Alexander is bold and I appreciate it. And to say that the boys are "a little on the thin side and would not have stood at battle" is bias and idiotic.
[Anonymous] gave it a6:
If this movie was confusing you obviously don't appreciate history enough to seen nor is it the care or you just weren't paying attention. This movie was not the best I have ever seen nor is it the worst. Alexander is bold and I appreciate it. And to say that the boys are "a little on the thin side and would not have stood at battle" is bias and idiotic.
Tom I. gave it a0:
Very disappointing film. Tried to be an epic but was confusing. Poor acting, the battle scenes were awful. The narration was poor and confused. The 8 year flash back scene was in the wrong place.The camera shots while in a battle scene were too close to actors and you lost all perspective. The story lingered too long on the homosexual side of his life. The fighters were not plausible as they were generally slim boys with makeup and would not have stood up in a battle. See Gladiator if you wish to see how battle scenes should be shot. Don't waste your money by going to see would be my advice.
Tom V. gave it a1:
Unmitigated dreck. Audience, what was left after the first 2 hours, had to be put on suicide watch.
M Kha gave it a0:
Worst ever. I haven't seen any demonstration of Alexander's "greatness"!! Talking about conquering Tyre and Egypt? Did I miss Part I of the movie or am I supposed to take it for granted that he's great by acting like a foolish drunk 99% of the time!
Jessi H. gave it a9:
I loved it. To fully appreciate this, you need to enjoy history, have an open mind, and actually be able to *pay* *attention* to what the 'characters' are saying. Alexander did a *lot,* and Stone is trying to include as much as he can, coherently, to give us the best picture all around of who Alexander really was. And I think that for the most part he did a really good job of acheiving this. I don't care how they marketed the film. I do, however, think that they should have gotten linguistic coaches for their actors in major roles - you cannot have what sounds like a Scottish Crateros, an Irish Alexander, etc. - it takes the viewers out of the movie enough for them to have to tell themselves to ignore that element (and can annoy many people throughout). I really enjoyed this; but I also happen to be the kind of person that loves long movies, enjoys history, has an open mind, and pays attention to what's being said and not said by the characters.
