Alexander the Duh
So I tried to watch Oliver Stone’s Alexander the other night. There was so much about it I wanted to like, and so much that was good about it, but what a synergetic suckfest. Almost as bad as Star Trek:Enterprise.
Colin Farrell was good, surprisingly. Angelina Jolie as Olympias was good, even with the 1960s “Mission:Impossible” generic Eastern European accent. Rosario Dawson was achingly beautiful as Roxane. Stone even handled the gay thing between Alexander and Hephaistion better than I expected. The battle scenes were glorious and splendid, and just what you want battle re-creations to look and sound like. If Stone had had Smell-o-Vision(tm) - which the Japanese have been working on for 30 years - the battle scenes would have been perfect.
But you know that really burned my ass?
There’s a map of the known world, centred on the Mediterranean. Now, we’re talking mid-4th century BC here, alright; the eastern Mediterranean, a world dominated or at least majorly influenced by the several Greek factions and menaced by the Persian Empire. Rome is over there somewhere and not doing much. So this map: Roman alphabet with Latinized Greek names and some actual English names(?!), some spelled wrong, but the actual name of the big old sea, on a Greek map, for Greek people to read and show other Greek people, was in actual Latin, in Roman letters: “Mare Mediterraneum”. On a Greek map. Greek. In Latin.
Ruined the whole movie for me.