Page 117 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

ALEXANDER is a product of director Oliver Stone’s lifelong fascination with Alexander, the king of Macedonia who conquered the Persian Empire in the fourth century B.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 the aging Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), 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 331 B.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 more
realistic 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).
Alexander (Colin Farrell) on his horse Bucephalus, reviewing the troops before the Battle of Gaugamela.
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.
Macedonia and the Conquests of Alexander 79
FILM HISTORY
Alexander (2004)
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Warner Bros/Jaap Buitendijk/The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY