Great expectation

“Alexander” the film does what Alexander the man never did: It wastes an opportunity.

The real Alexander squandered nothing, especially not time. A pre-Christian prototype of the “live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse” lifestyle, he conquered huge chunks of the known world, an estimated 2 million square miles worth, by the time he died just shy of his 33rd birthday. Is it any wonder they called him “the Great”?

When you throw in a pansexual lifestyle and loads of exotic locales including dehydrating deserts and sodden jungles, “Alexander” could have been a film worth remembering. What we get instead is an indifferent epic that tells us more about the inside of writer-director Oliver Stone’s head than we really want to know.

For Stone, who made his reputation with dramas about the more recent battles of Vietnam (“Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July”), confesses to a lifelong obsession with Alexander. At a leisurely 2 hours and 56 minutes, his latest film plays like a fantasy self-portrait, something he did because directing the life was as close as he could get to living it himself. When star Colin Farrell says “Oliver is more Alexander than I could hope to be,” he is revealing more than he realizes.

This is not a knock on Farrell, who throws himself into the part of the charismatic leader and actually comes off as someone men might follow into battle. But there is only so much any actor can do to overcome a scenario that lacks the sense of purpose its subject was never without. Stone may be mad about Alexander, but he never convinces us that we should be as well.

Part of the problem, and this is rather unexpected coming from the director of “Natural Born Killers,” is the utter conventionality of the proceedings.

There’s nothing fresh about this plodding endeavor, nowhere it goes that other films have not gone before. Even the eagle that serves as Alexander’s symbolic totem feels on loan from the U.S. Postal Service.

Alexander’s father, King Philip of Macedonia (Val Kilmer, taking time off from being Moses), is the old soldier who prepared the way for his son. His neglected mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie in an accent said to be Albanian), is the type who spends her spare time with snakes.

Neither one, however, is too busy to fill the boy’s impressionable young head with platitudes. “Never hesitate, they are like people, they can turn on you,” Mom says, a hand on those snakes, while Dad later chimes in “a king must know how to hurt those he loves.” It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.

Alexander’s story, related via flashback decades after his death by old companion Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) has difficulty being compelling because the guy never lost a battle. Stone sees him as a new kind of conqueror, a one-man U.N. who wants to civilize the world and treat everyone with respect. It’s a nice idea, but it’s presented so listlessly it’s hard to feel that the filmmaker took it at all seriously.

The same thing goes for Alexander’s relationship with Hephaistion (Jared Leto), a love match so well-known in the ancient world it was said that the great man “was defeated only once, and that was by the thighs of Hephaistion.” Though Leto’s character is allowed to go in for eye shadow, this relationship is presented as so chaste and comradely you might mistake these lovers for Eagle Scouts comparing notes on merit badges.

Not so for the relationship Alexander had with Roxane (Rosario Dawson), the Bactrian princess he makes his queen. There is more sexual energy in the extended wedding night tussle between these two (which Dawson is called on to play pretty much without any clothes) than in the entire Alexander/Hephaistion liaison. It’s an emphasis Stone -- and likely Warner Bros. as well -- feels both personally and commercially at home with.

It’s also clear that what Stone most cared about was re-creating Alexander’s battles. The director proved to be a bear about authenticity when it came to ancient weaponry and deployment of troops, reportedly investing a month of principal photography and three more weeks of second unit shooting in detailing the Macedonians’ epic defeat of the Persians at Gaugamela. The small boy inside a man may grow older, but he never goes away.

Although the battles, including a hell of a later tussle with Indians on elephants, are impressive on a surface level, they never really involve us anywhere else. If, as the Virgil quote that starts the film claims, fortune favors the bold, “Alexander” has not been nearly bold enough.

*

‘Alexander’

MPAA rating: R for violence and some sexuality and nudity

Times guidelines: Extended graphic battle scenes and one graphic sex scene

Colin Farrell...Alexander

Angelina Jolie...Olympias

Val Kilmer...Philip

Anthony Hopkins...Old Ptolemy

Jared Leto...Hephaistion

Rosario Dawson...Roxane

Warner Bros. Pictures and Intermedia Pictures present, a Moritz Borman production, in association with IMF, released by Warner Bros. Director Oliver Stone. Producers Thomas Schuhly, Jon Kilik, Iain Smith, Moritz Borman. Executive producers Paul Rassam, Matthias Deyle. Screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Editors Tom Nordberg, Yann Herve. Costume designer Jenny Beavan. Music Vangelis. Production designer Jan Roelfs. Supervising art director Jonathan McKinstry. Set decorator Jim Erickson. Running time: 2 hours, 56 minutes.

In general release.