Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut (2007) DVDRip
Review:
Oliver Stone is not a man to let things go. He struggled for years to make a film version of the story of Alexander the Great, which probably made it all the more crushing when Alexander was released in 2004 and became the season's pop cultural whipping boy. The film landed in theatres with a thud, having already been judged in the press and set up as some kind of colossal failure before moviegoers even got a chance to buy a ticket.
I saw the movie back then, and I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Sure, Alexander wasn't that great, but it also wasn't the kind of blunder that deserved the buckets of vitriol being heaped upon it. When the movie first came to DVD the following year, Stone made a new edition, trimming it from 175 to 167 minutes and dubbing it the "Director's Cut." It was promised to be "faster paced, more action packed"--the real words on the box, not mine--but much of the resulting chatter centered around how Stone had toned down the homosexual relationship between Alexander (Colin Farrell) and his friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto). This was one of the major elements cultural pundits attacked the movie for, so toning that plot point down sounded to me like artistic cowardice, like Stone was capitulating to his critics in the worst way. Formerly notorious for sticking to his guns at all costs, an attitude that maybe had led to the lynch mob that circled around Alexander to begin with, it appeared to me that the director had lost his nerve and given in. So, I skipped the "director's cut" and left Alexander on the shelf.
Oliver Stone is not a man to let things go. He struggled for years to make a film version of the story of Alexander the Great, which probably made it all the more crushing when Alexander was released in 2004 and became the season's pop cultural whipping boy. The film landed in theatres with a thud, having already been judged in the press and set up as some kind of colossal failure before moviegoers even got a chance to buy a ticket.
I saw the movie back then, and I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Sure, Alexander wasn't that great, but it also wasn't the kind of blunder that deserved the buckets of vitriol being heaped upon it. When the movie first came to DVD the following year, Stone made a new edition, trimming it from 175 to 167 minutes and dubbing it the "Director's Cut." It was promised to be "faster paced, more action packed"--the real words on the box, not mine--but much of the resulting chatter centered around how Stone had toned down the homosexual relationship between Alexander (Colin Farrell) and his friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto). This was one of the major elements cultural pundits attacked the movie for, so toning that plot point down sounded to me like artistic cowardice, like Stone was capitulating to his critics in the worst way. Formerly notorious for sticking to his guns at all costs, an attitude that maybe had led to the lynch mob that circled around Alexander to begin with, it appeared to me that the director had lost his nerve and given in. So, I skipped the "director's cut" and left Alexander on the shelf.
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