Aside from a higher production value, watching Oliver Stone’s $155 million Alexander isn’t a whole lot different than watching a similar such biopic on The History Channel. Despite the lavishly decorated sets, there's really nothing to hold our interest for three hours as we watch Alexander storm across Asia.

Having witnessed the events firsthand in his youth, Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), now in his old age, narrates our story as he delivers the history to a scribe. This is the first and most fundamental problem with Alexander. What we are watching is not a story with any sort of plot. It’s a visualization of a straightforward historical account. This might be interesting for history’s sake alone, though I have no idea how accurate it even is. The history begins with the birth of Alexander and follows him through his childhood for a good half hour before moving on with his ascendancy to the crown and his subsequent decision to plow eastward through Persia, conquering all in sight, before he is eventually defeated in India.

When we’re not being told what’s going on through Ptolemy’s dialogue, we see what happens through the dialogue of all of the other characters. The heavy reliance on dialogue does provide for some dramatic scenes where all of the actors get to act. However, it is largely uninteresting for us because the characters themselves simply aren’t that interesting. It’s not that the character’s don’t have lots of problems; it’s that they don’t have any real character. Alexander, in most parts, plays like a soap opera.

Alexander is also the 100th film in the last ten years to try to be the next Braveheart, and this one fails more miserably in that respect than any of the others. Its structure is similar - childhood background to rising hero to commander of a great army to death. But Alexander also rips two full scenes wholesale. One involves Alexander riding back and forth in front of his army before the battle telling them that they’re fighting for their families while the opponent consists of hired slaves. This is totally ridiculous because Alexander’s army isn’t fighting for their families, they’re fighting to unnecessarily expand his empire. Indeed, they are Braveheart’s British.

Another such scene, in the latter part of the film, shows us the army, sick and tired of war and on the verge of an uprising when Alexander – almost humorously – repeats William Wallace’s line telling them they can go home and die in peace or stary and die in glory. Except that the combat, in this case, involvs the killing of an innocent people far, far away from home, for no good reason. It's all so extraordinarily absurd, I was never really sure if we were supposed to be rooting for Alexander or not.

Alexander (Colin Farrell) briefly becomes an interesting character as he struggles to avoid becoming his rancorous father, Philip (Val Kilmer), or his scheming mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie). We sense that Alexander sees himself becoming as brutal as his father and as ambitious as his mother, but it ends there. The film presents a great opportunity for Alexander to change and rise up, but then he dies. A tragedy? Perhaps. But its tragic strength loses significant weight when you’re rooting for the character to die so the film will finally end.

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