Alexander the Great is one of history’s most intriguing figures, having conquered more territory by the age of 25 than anyone before or after him. His short life (he died several years, many won battles and thousands of kilometres onto the Asian continent later) and incredible achievements have inspired the sort of hero worship that had already started -- perhaps instigated by Alexander himself -- during his own lifetime. As Jones explains in his introduction to The World of Athens: "It is impossible to write a biography of [Alexander]. His true character has disappeared entirely under a mass of myth and hero-worship."

Of course an entire life (even a  short one) as full of significant happenings as Alexander’s cannot be crammed into a three-hour epic and the script of Alexander, written by Oliver Stone with Laeta Kalogridis and Christopher Kyle, has to condense and change matters and decide on a point of view that will make sense for an audience that might not be familiar with Alexander’s many exploits. Their elegant solution is to let the Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) tell the story in flashbacks; he was one of Alexander’s generals before becoming Egypt’s highest governor after Alexander’s death.

Ptolemy has chosen to commit Alexander’s story to papyrus, supposedly to preserve the story but more likely to enhance his own standing -- after all, he derived his authority from his association with Alexander. This clever solution circumvents the problem of hero-worship and also adds the possibility for Ptolemy (and thus Stone) to add in ancient gossip as it were the truth or at any rate something believed by a contemporary of Alexander. The most interesting gossip surrounds the possible cause of Alexander’s death, which is the film’s starting point. Was he poisoned, had he drunk too much, was he simply exhausted or did he die of grief over the death of his soul mate Hephaistion, who died shortly before Alexander did?

There are three relationships that carry the film’s narrative. First there is the relationship between Alexander (Colin Farrell) and his mother, the scheming Olympias (Angelina Jolie). Then there is the difficult relationship with Olympias’ husband and Alexander’s father Philip (Val Kilmer) who is the king of Macedon. He is preparing his son for a military career, though he explains to little Alex that "A king is not born, Alexander, he is made." Olympias, being a foreign queen, feels relatively little at ease at Philip’s court and when Philip takes a second wife who becomes pregnant straight away, she fears for her son's succession rights. Not much later, Philip is murdered and Olympias pushes her adolescent son onto the throne.

Hephaistion has been Alexander’s childhood friend, who does not let Alexander win just because he is of royal blood. It seems that, in a scheming world where everyone is obsessed with power, the one with the most power, Alexander, can only truly trust Hephaistion to tell him the truth. When Alexander becomes King he makes Hephaistion (Jared Leto) one of his generals, together with Ptolemy and some other close friends. They continue the work started by Philip, that is, conquer Greece and then Persia. The film fast-forwards to the decisive battle of Gaugamela, where Persian troops headed by the king Darius III, faced the much smaller Macedonian army. The battle, on a wide sandy plain is a wonder to behold, with gorgeous cinematography that shows us both the battle up-close and from a the bird’s eye view, where we witness from above the military cunning  used to crush the hopes of the Persian army. When a gap openes in Darius' defence-lines and Alexander himself charged towards the king, Darius flees, and his army with him. Alexander chases Darius until he finds him left behind dead, assassinated by one of the people of the Persian king’s entourage. In a wonderfully observed moment, Alexander drapes his royal cloak over the dead king, as if to say "You were the king of Asia, I will now follow in your footsteps."

And so he does; he arrives at Babylon and soon his hunger for more leads Alexander’s army to the far reaches of Bactria and the Hindu Kush. He slowly becomes obsessed with pushing ever further, "Until the end of the world," as he once mentions. His army, at first beguiled by the rich spoils of war, soon grow weary, until they refuse to go any further. They have not seen Macedonia for years and would like to go home. Alexander is pushed more and more towards the Eastern peoples and tribes who have pledged him allegiance; they are willing to fight for him and to go on, and he, in return is willing to absorb much of their culture and habits. He even takes an indigenous princess, Roxane, as his wife, which outrages the Macedonians, who want pure offspring for "their" empire. Instead, Alexander, in Stone's version and probably in real life,  seems more interested in a fusion of cultures rather than a domination of one by the other.

Colin Farrell, as the small but beautiful Macedonian leader carries the role well and essays his slow spiralling out of control with a restrained force that is remarkable. He has the difficult task of representing in flesh and blood a mythical hero who was worshipped even in his own lifetime. Alexander’s relationship with Hephaistion is something he must increasingly rely on as his voice of reason, as the rest of the army grows ever more restless and hostile. There is no physical relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion (at least not in the film) but their friendship goes much deeper than Alexander’s marriage with Roxane or his frolics with the eunuch Bagoas. In a startlingly moving scene (that does not have any historical basis that I know of, but drives home the point very well) Hephaistion shows up in Alexander’s bedroom after the wedding with Roxane. Without wasting too many words, he presents Alexander with a ring of his own. A ring that, except for Alexander’s wedding night, will stay on Alexander’s finger until his death.

Oliver Stone’s film has tried to tackle the impossible by trying to give a myth a human face. His film has become a daring essay on the conflicted feelings of a conqueror who apparently wanted to conquer in order to unite; someone who was increasingly driven away by his closest military allies and thus had to change plans and seek his alliances elsewhere. Alexander was a driven man if ever there was one, and it is evident that Oliver Stone has poured in as much passion into this project as Alexander as in his. The film is dense and complicated but at the same time the sheer audacity and rawness of the emotions portrayed give it an edge that rival Stone’s best work. The production also greatly benefits from the splendid cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, and the production design by Jan Roelfs beautifully reflects the voyage ever further East.The fact that the film is more of an emotional rather than a linear narrative might throw some people of, though I would suggest that anyone who is willing to just sit back and let the epic wash over him will have an overview of an intensely passionate life as few film-makers could bring it to the screen.

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