Alexander, staring Colin Farrell, and Troy, staring Brad Pit, both came out the same summer. That summer, the critics called one of them a pretty good war movie that took license with history and the other one a historically accurate, long, boring, sex-charged waste of time. The other night, renting from the DVD kiosk at the grocery store, I struggled to remember which was which. In the end, “He chose… poorly.”*

I need to preface this with some history. In ancient Greece, sex was … uninhibited. There were whole temples in which one could “pay tribute” to a particular god by having sex with a temple prostitute. Was Alexander the Great gay? No, but only because “gay” wasn’t really invented yet. He was just Greek. (Maybe that would make a better euphemism for our modern culture’s sexual switch hitters.)

If you’ve read my blog at all, you’ve probably figured out, I’m not a big fan of mixing your pipe fittings**. Still I think it’s worth mentioning that Oliver Stone surprised me with how he handled Alexander batting from both sides of the plate. Alexander’s “lover” spends the whole movie making fawning glances and syrupy comments about his feelings and, as Roger Ebert put it, “…the rest of the time, they hug a lot.” Meanwhile, on Alexander’s wedding night (with the only female love interest in the movie), Stone offers a scene befitting those channels you have to pay to watch. Again, I’ll go with Ebert’s description: “[It] ends with them engaged in the kind of unbridled passion where you hope nobody gets hurt.”

In between scenes of weird sexual tension, there was, apparently, a war moving going on. There were a couple of big battle scenes that are frankly confusing. I knew there was supposed to be some masterful battlefield tactics going on, but I never figured out what. Heavy use of blowing dirt and shaking cameras eliminated the need to actually do anything clever on the screen. Instead we see a lot of Farrell yelling and a fair amount of millisecond blood squirt clips.

The rest of the movie (and believe me, there’s a *lot* of the rest of the movie) was filled with gruelingly long speeches and philosophical arguments. Imagine a two hour long debate over whether the toilet paper should roll frontwards or backwards, but with more yelling.

Just about every element of the movie bothered me. It seemed that Oliver Stone tried to use the make up department to help the viewer know who was who. For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that Persian men wear thick eye liner *all the time* including during battle. Likewise, if you are a Greek soldier, you must have at least two gruesome scars on your face.

Accents in American films always bug me, but this one was just silly. The Greeks had either the standard Hollywood bad British accent or a thick Scottish/Irish accent. (Seriously, one of the guys from Braveheart is in this movie and sounds the same.) Then, Angelina Jolie’s character sounds kind of Turkish or maybe Middle Eastern. Seriously, I don’t think anyone in history ever had an accent like that.

Sorry to get all long winded on a review of a movie I didn’t like. There was just so much to not like about it. In the end, I want my two dollars back.

* Movie reference! Can you be the first to comment with it’s source and the character who spoke it?

** NOT a movie reference, but rather a sexual metaphor using pluming terms. Please DON’t be the first to comment on what you think it means.