as an alexander the great fan, i am excited to see many sides of alexander in this movie and this extented version is better.it is great to see battles and marches of alexander in this film.but i must say that even this version, which is greatly improved, made me disappointed.because in the movie, in the first scene alexander is about to die and in the middle of film alexander is a student, and towards the end of film we see young alexander and his relationship with his father philip.these all have bad effect on film.i wish the film would have gone on in a row, that is to say in the first scene a baby is born whose name is alexander and the film goes on until alexander dies after a feast.but still i like this movie and this version of alexander. "alexander revisited" makes "alexander" one of the best epics of all time.

what a wasted opportunity. what a waste of money. what a waste of Angie jolie in gorgeous ancient greek attire with the snakes and all.
Begin at the end. Good idea Olie ! not. Tell the story in a series of flashbacks. Dead clever, Dead literary, dead movie results.
Don't let's start on the irish accents. Bad idea. Twittering leprechaun Alexander the midget wit de mophead trying to be DEEP at the end of every scene. I wouldn't follow this demigod to the village pub never mind accross THE KNOWN WORLD.
No No this is not a sword and sandal greek tragedy more a hollywood flip flop on a gigantic scale.
Two characters really. Him and his mum, mum and him. The rest as portable scenery, who cares. No narrative drive, no convincing emotional dynamo at the heart of this tale. A few good set pieces, some bloody battles with subtitles.
What a wasted opportunity - obviously in the wake of Gladiators' success but we end up with a contused, sprawling mess of a film that makes Troy actually look like a classic.
All woe and no WOAH.

This version has a more epic scope to the story and does feel less rushed - the intermission is useful in allowing an opportunity for reflection. Don't be fooled by the "2-disc" tag - it is amongst the worst DVD packages of recent films I can remember for a big-budget production as it is strictly limited to a new introduction from oliver Stone (no commentaries, makings-of documentaries etc). Worth a watch but purchase only if you're a fan of the subject or director as it doesn't provide much value beyond watching the film.

Alexander might have been gay. We know that, there is no need to make a film about it which is precisely what has happened here. You might think to have a notepad handy to take notes because of the sheer amount of information. You are swamped in endless names and characters. The battle scenes are boring and complicated.

It feels like more of a documentary and a bad one at that, the narrator sounds as bored as you will no doubt be at this point. Characters are assassinated with annoying frequency and you will find yourself rewinding to see what just happened.

Extending this film turned an already boring film into something more. I watched Troy the day before and the latter is in a league of its own. Towards the end of Alexander I started fast forwarding just to see if something more might arise but to my dismay no.

An exceedingly boring and pointless film. Buy Troy.

Three-and-a-half stars, actually.

The story of Alexander is so broad in scope it would be impossible to do it justice, but Oliver Stone has made a bold attempt at it. Some scenes work quite well. An example is the Battle of Gaugamela, with which Stone begins the epic (conflating it with the battle of Granicus in which Cleitus actually saved Alexander's life). Although I am not usually an enthusiast of battle scenes in glorious technicolor, I found Stone's depiction of Alexander's third major battle with Darius III quite thrilling. I was very interested in seeing the sarissas--the Macedonian long (and heavy) pikes--in action. I also appreciated Stone's labeling of the left, right, and center wings in an attempt to clarify Alexander's strategy of attacking the enemy at its strongest point rather than its weakest.

I found the Battle of the Hydaspes River with Porus less convincing. For one thing, Stone placed the mutiny at the Hypahsis before the battle with Porus and not after (In addition to facing monsoons, rotting clothes, fungus, disease, and poisonous snakes, the army had to face King Porus and his elephants--the last straw on what by that time was a 17,000 mile march that made the troops demand that Alexander turn back). For another, the actual account of the Macedonian army on one side of the Hydaspes River (the Jhelum) and the Indian army on the other side paralleling and trying to psych each other out is so much more exciting. Although the rearing and roaring of the elephants (and the resulting bloody mess) was effective, the armies did not fight in the middle of a tree-glutted jungle, but on a sandy spot where there was room to maneuver. Since Stone also conflated the Hydaspes (in which the 31-year old Bucephalus died from injuries) with the Battle with the Mallians, where Alexander was shot in the lung, the surrender of Porus to Alexander (one of the great moments) got dropped. In fact Stone stole Porus' line of wanting to be treated like a king, and reassigned it to Stateira at Babylon, who wanted to be treated like a princess (big deal!).

In addition to the Gaugamela scene, the flashbacks worked quite well; in fact, I think the flashbacks to Alexander's childhood and youth, probably worked the best as far as explicating the story, which is actually a bit of a mess after Babylon.

And while I can see that it might not be practical, not to mention impossible, to present all the highlights of the saga, the omission of Alexander's burning of Persepolis is simply inexcusable; and Stone also missed a couple of great opportunities, first, by not showing Alexander's armies moving through the burning oil fields between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and next, by omitting the "Macedonian flyers" climbing of the Soghdian rock, which is where Alexander is said to have met and married Roxane (Her introduction to Alexander in the movie, not to mention the animalistic love scene that seems to have been intended to demonstrate Alexander's latent heterosexuality to those who are bothered by Hephaistion and Bagoas, was both tacky and lame).

As for the characters, Anthony Hopkins gave the elderly Ptolemy--dictating his memoirs--a touch of class (But did Ptolemy's scribes who are shown following him around with their laptop papyrus desks really have pens that didn't need to be dipped into ink?); and Christopher Plummer made a suitably distinguished Aristotle. However, I could have done without Angelina Jolie's pseudo-Epirot accent; and Colin Farrel's five-o'clock shadow made him look more like Alexander the Wimp. Stone also omitted major characters that would have added immensely to the plot, including Callisthenes, Aristotle's nephew who objected to Alexander's dressing in Persian style and making the Macedonians prostrate themselves on the ground (plot-points that got lost in this production), and Stone also omitted Aristander of Telmessus, Alexander's soothsayer and damage-control czar, who used the omens to explain Alexander's increasingly bizarre behavior as he moved farther away from civilization.

I did not see the first versions of this film, so I cannot compare this one with them; and while I found "Alexander Revisited" interesting--partly because the actual story is so fascinating--I feel that Oliver Stone missed the sweeping scope that the story would have had at the hands--say--of David Lean. But then David Lean probably would have had the good sense not to attempt an epic of such magnitude.