Whew, that was a long three hours! It was around the 90-minute mark that I looked at my watch for the first time. I was disappointed to find that only 90 minutes had passed. It seemed like we should have at least been at the two-hour mark by then. Alexander spent seven years conquering Asia. Walking out of that movie, I felt like I'd been there the entire seven years.

Oliver Stone's Alexander takes a look at the life of Alexander the Great who conquered most of Asia in the name of Macedonia and Greece. According to his scheming, snake-loving mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), he was the son of Zeus. To call the relationship between his parents dysfunctional would be an understatement. His father King Phillip (Val Kilmer) was a great general who later discarded Olympias and Alexander when he married a younger woman who bore him another son.

Once the family dynamic is established, the movie focuses on the seven years Alexander spent conquering Babylon and points north and east. With his lover Hephaestion at side (a heavily eye lined Jared Leto), Alexander goes in search of the end of the world, along the way, uniting barbarian peoples and introducing them to the glory of the Grecian way of life. Along the way, he marries an Asian woman (Rosario Dawson) and takes on a number of male companions. All of this is told through flashback as his friend Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) recounts the tale of Alexander to a scribe.

The problem with Alexander is that we never really see the man of mythical proportions that Ptolemy describes. Ptolemy likens Alexander to a god - and his achievements merit that god-like status - but the way Oliver Stone chooses to portray Alexander is far less than god-like. The Alexander we see is a bit too overemotional and vulnerable to be the man of grandeur we expect.

Troy wasn't great but at least we got to look at a pretty hot and buff Brad Pitt. Alexander gives us a slightly buff Colin Farrell, but the bad blond wigs negate any of the hotness that he might have had. Rosario Dawson as his first wife, Roxane, is woefully underused. In her love scene with Farrell, she has no lines, she grunts (but then again the men in the audience would have probably missed anything she said as she was grunting in the nude). She had a handful of lines in the entire three hours. The best performances belong to Kilmer and Jolie who go after their characters with a lot of gusto. Both come dangerously close to overacting but Stone wants us to think of Alexander's parents as larger than life so their over-the-top performances can be expected.

Farrell on the other hand doesn't ever really convey a strong or certain Alexander. He plays him as a man who is lead by his emotions and not as someone that men would follow into battle. He shows a lot of tenderness but for a man who was told from a young age that he was the son of Zeus and who idolized the legendary warrior Achilles, I expected more. There is a tendency in many of today's movies (Troy and King Arthur immediately come to mind) to separate the 'man' from the myth and the legend that has grown around him. What many of these writers, in my opinion anyway, fail to realize is that the myth and legend that has grown around these men arose out of who they were. To tell their stories devoid of the legend is to do their stories a great disservice.

Speaking of writing, Stone and co-writers Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis have a muddled script. They try to recreate that movie-based 'historic English' (the one that assumes that people in history spoke with more classical and Shakespearian tendencies) and it doesn't really work. The dialogue is clunky and the few bits of 'clever' dialogue were not understood by the audience. The only way we knew something was supposed to be witty or funny is when the other characters laughed. Hopkins drones on for way too long at the beginning and the end and his voiceover grows annoying over almost 3 hours (at the end, I found myself thinking "Just end it already!").

Much has been made of the homoeroticism of Alexander but aside from one kiss, all it really amounts to is a lot of sappy talk and manly hugs between Alexander and Hephaestion and a lot of batting of eyelashes between Alexander and a number of 'pretty boys' sprinkled throughout the movie.

As for director Stone, he's seen better days. Though he did to a great job of capturing the grandeur of Babylon and the Indian battle with the elephants was impressive, other battles were hard to follow. If Stone's goal was to convey the confusion of battle, then he succeeded, but he seemed to lose a lot of the audience in the process.

Although Alexander led a life that lends itself easily to a film adaptation, this is the second film to attempt to tackle his life (The first was done in 1956). Director Baz Luhrman (Romeo & Juliet, Moulin Rogue) was in the process of putting together his own biopic but conceded when Stone's project seemed to fall into place faster. It would have been nice to see what he would have done with Alexander's life.