A historical epic is what a director makes when he wants to matter again: a globe-trotting sword-and-sandal spectacular that has everything from small nations of extras to bellicose pachyderms on the payroll.
Lord knows, Stone spent enough of his life to make this one happen -- decades, by his count.
Now that ''Alexander" is finally here, the best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."
The movie's most assured moments are the wars, but those could have been filmed by anyone. War was personal and terrifying to Stone in ''Platoon" and ''Born on the Fourth of July," but it's often generic in ''Alexander." If we've seen one sequence in which anonymous soldiers are impaled by zooming arrows, I'm afraid we've seen them all.
A wise old Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) dictates Alexander's life to us. Regally robed, shuffling, speaking with a scratchy voice, Hopkins is the movie's Yoda.
In his youth, Ptolemy was one of Alexander's soldiers and advisers, and he tells how a series of assassinations made Alexander king at 19. By the time he died at 32, in 323 BC, Alexander had expanded his empire from the Mediterranean to the Middle East to India. (Alexandrias pop up everywhere on the map, like parking lots or Starbucks.)
Stone and fellow screenwriters Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis cover all the bases, taking liberties with both ancient history and the life of his nation-plundering Macedonian general. The film's lessons could be slipped inside a fortune cookie. (''Never," for instance, ''confuse feelings with duties," Alexander is told.) The combat sequences are grueling. The photography is buttery. The betrayals are many, the hard-core loyalists few, the tan lines ubiquitous, and the hero himself gay. I think.
Some of the trouble with ''Alexander" is that Stone has Farrell's ambitious conqueror caught up in so much intrigue on the battlefield and in the boudoir that the director doesn't seem to know what to make of him. Farrell, for his part, makes a serviceable icon. He's fiery and gentle, and, above all, physically and emotionally athletic. But Alexander is pulled in so many directions that both Farrell's performance and the character are stretched thin.
