Did watching the movie 'Alexander the Great' 2004 teach you anything you didn't know before? If so, what? Make a personal comment on the film.

Essay by hills08Junior High, 9th gradeA+, May 2006

download word file, 7 pages 3.7

"Alexander the Great" is a film released in 2004 directed by Oliver Stone and starring Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Farrell, Val Kilmer and Jared Leto.

In my opinion, Oliver Stone's movie, Alexander was a 3-hour waste of time if you were watching it for entertainment purposes. The characters lacked depth, Colin Farrell's blonde do was very strange and the whole movie moved too slowly. Giant leaps were made with no explanations, battle scenes weren't particularly entertaining and the whole movie was utterly boring. On the other hand the movie was completely all true historically apart from one or two small things and I learnt a lot from it. Oliver Stone even consulted an Oxford professor of history: Robin Lane Fox to help with making his movie.

Alexander the movie was actually quite educational. Because Oliver Stone's attitude towards Alexander was slightly ambivalent but on the whole pretty positive, his movie was a bit biased.

For people in history and today the life of Alexander has a legendary, heroic quality to it. But Alexander was autocratic and at times cruel, and his armies killed thousands upon thousands. Oliver Stone slightly glorifies Alexander without regard to the less admirable aspects of him (like the death of his cousin and political rival, Amyntas). Military conquest of thousands of 'barbarian' peoples and lands was widely considered glorious. If people surrendered to Alexander, they were spared and their leaders were often reinstated. Often, he himself was received as a 'liberator,' replacing a Persian Empire, which was not exactly loved by one and all. When he sacked whole cities who opposed him - Thebes or Tyre - his ruthlessness shocks us, but it was not outside the conduct of war by other contemporaries: his father Philip and other Greek cities in...