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Alexander the Great and the Alexander Tradition | Home
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The talk of the town in 2004 was the much-anticipated release of Oliver Stone's movie Alexander. The hype was all the greater, given that the Australian director Baz Luhrman was said to be at an advanced stage of planning a similar movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Alexander and Nicole Kidman as his mother Olympias. Luhrman's movie has since been abandoned, and you can read Rottentomatoes.com to get a sense of the critical response to Stone's movie. [The historical advisor for ''Alexander'' was the renowned Oxford professor and Alexander-scholar Robin Lane Fox, who not only led the cavalry charges in the movie, but wrote the official movie tie-in book ''The Making of Alexander: The Official Guide to the Epic Film Alexander'' (2005).]

Let's get away from this sort of nonsense. For your first short writing assignment, I want you to view Stone's Alexander, as dispassionately as you can. Then write a review of it (about 3 pages in length), aimed less at the readers of People magazine than at those of The New Yorker, or even the American Journal of Archaeology. How successful is this movie in terms of historical and archaeological accuracy? Is it effective as a vehicle for telling Alexander's story? What are its strong points and weak points? Do you think there are intrinsic problems with attempts to provide a narrative account of the life of a man such as Alexander (if so, why)?

We will share our opinions and impressions of the movie (I have written a review of it too) by posting them to the wiki.