Oh, so much historical film. Historical film no longer special.
With five or six friends, I have just finished a double feature of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven and Oliver Stone's Alexander. And as much as I thought immediately upon finishing Kingdom of Heaven that it had been a beautifully photographed and rather incoherent film, I hadn't seen nothing yet: it's amazing what a little comparison will do.
Kingdom of Heaven had real problems with pacing and narrative sense—I'm thinking in particular of the storm and the shipwreck, which left us wondering if the captain had taken an unplanned detour into the North Sea—and several of its characters could have been introduced more smoothly, as it took me until well into the second hour to figure out that the mysterious Sibylla was the sister of the King of Jerusalem, and thus a political figure in her own right rather than simply the wife of the head bad guy and consequent love interest of our hero, and I am not generally the kind of person who gets lost in films. There was much obvious discussion of the significance of Jerusalem, the causes of war, and the pragmatic as well as idealistic reasons for tolerance and coexistence, which were played about as subtly as neon-pink highlighting. The dialogue had a bad case of cod-medieval. And although I know very little about the Levant in the late twelfth century, I was still left with the feeling that bits of history had been pretzeled.
On the other hand, there was Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons, and I was delighted to spot Alexander Siddig in a supporting role. And anytime the leper king was onscreen, I was fascinated. (I loved him; so didn't surprise me to find out that he was played by Edward Norton, of whom I had heard much and whom I'd never actually seen in a film. I was more surprised to discover that his character, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, was in fact real. I think that's wonderful. Even if the silver mask was fictitious.) If I have to pick a Ridley Scott film, I still think my money's on Blade Runner or Alien—or even Gladiator, if the choice is between historical epics—but Kingdom of Heaven was a flawed film, not a total disaster. If nothing else, it may be the only movie I've ever seen where the climactic siege of a city is solved not through heroic and extraordinary defense, but through negotiation and surrender: where the city is, in fact, taken. And it is awarded extra points for being rated R for "strong violence and epic warfare."
Alexander, however . . . Primarily this film has left me with a strong desire to get my copy of Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven back from my father's friend Maria (who did lend me Funeral Games in exchange) so that I can fix my brain, and failing that I'm going to re-read The Persian Boy tonight and lament the waste of a perfectly beautiful Bagoas* in a film that was a B-movie at best, before it fell entirely off the cliff of reasonable disbelief halfway through the battle in India.** Oh, Christopher Plummer. You must have had gambling debts.
Out of all the characters, I think Angelina Jolie as Olympias fared best because she took the high camp and ran with it, snakes and accent and Oedipal complex and all. I don't even know where to begin with the rest. The Saint Crispin's Day speech at Gaugamela? The subtitles that helpfully inform us we're looking at "The Macedonian Left" or "Babylon, Persia"? The total confusion of important characters, so that after an hour and a half we were still trying to figure out which of Alexander's commanders were which? (I could tell Kleitos straight off for his dark hair—"the Black"—and Antigonos because, well, Monophthalmos, but beyond those obvious characteristics . . .) The absolute inability of Colin Farrell's Alexander to demonstrate the kind of charisma that leads sensible Macedonian soldiers to march tens of thousands of miles into the unknown world because their king believes he can? I'm not necessarily faulting the actor; God knows he got no help from the script. But you need someone like Peter O'Toole as T.E. Lawrence, crazy and glittering and intense: the dimension of myth, not mortals. I really did like the underground red-and-black-figure paintings of the bloodier Greek myths that Philip shows the young Alexander by torchlight—Hesiod's Theogony by way of Lascaux. The reconstruction of the Ištar Gate at Babylon was very cool. And whoever they cast for Bagoas, as I said, I instantly believed in the role: but he had far too little to do. I know, I know, Oliver Stone was not interested in making a film of The Persian Boy. But since other scenes, such as Philip's drunken near-rape of Olympias as witnessed by a wide-eyed child Alexander, were nicked right out of Mary Renault, couldn't he have spared us some of the pain and simply adapted her books? The script would have sucked ten times less, I promise. It could hardly have sucked more.
I suppose the night wasn't a dead loss. Kingdom of Heaven, as I've said, wasn't a terrible film—although I'm not sure how much it just benefited by comparison. And we did mock Alexander mercilessly for a good two hours, after which we were reduced to whimpers of disbelief and fruitless pleas for death. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hans_the_bold classified Alexander as a meteor movie: when you just want a meteor to smack through the scenery and kill all the characters; or, failing that, fall on you so that you don't have to see the rest of the film.) But it is a sad statement when you realize that The Fall of the Roman Empire could only be a step up in film quality. At the very least, it has Christopher Plummer in a better role than Aristotle.
*I fail to see why Greece objected to the portrayal of Alexander's bisexuality: in this film, it was almost nonexistent. If we are meant to believe that Roxane, for example, views Hephaistion as a serious rival for Alexander's sexual and political affections, then we need more than soulful eye contact and a few over-the-shoulder clinches between the Patroklos and Achilles of Macedonia—especially against Alexander and Roxane's knock-down, drag-out lovemaking. Also, if a film contains the line "It was said later that Alexander was never defeated in his lifetime, except by Hephaistion's thighs," it had damn well better be prepared to deliver on the promise of hot thigh-conquering action.
**We concluded that it had jumped the elephant.
With five or six friends, I have just finished a double feature of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven and Oliver Stone's Alexander. And as much as I thought immediately upon finishing Kingdom of Heaven that it had been a beautifully photographed and rather incoherent film, I hadn't seen nothing yet: it's amazing what a little comparison will do.
Kingdom of Heaven had real problems with pacing and narrative sense—I'm thinking in particular of the storm and the shipwreck, which left us wondering if the captain had taken an unplanned detour into the North Sea—and several of its characters could have been introduced more smoothly, as it took me until well into the second hour to figure out that the mysterious Sibylla was the sister of the King of Jerusalem, and thus a political figure in her own right rather than simply the wife of the head bad guy and consequent love interest of our hero, and I am not generally the kind of person who gets lost in films. There was much obvious discussion of the significance of Jerusalem, the causes of war, and the pragmatic as well as idealistic reasons for tolerance and coexistence, which were played about as subtly as neon-pink highlighting. The dialogue had a bad case of cod-medieval. And although I know very little about the Levant in the late twelfth century, I was still left with the feeling that bits of history had been pretzeled.
On the other hand, there was Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons, and I was delighted to spot Alexander Siddig in a supporting role. And anytime the leper king was onscreen, I was fascinated. (I loved him; so didn't surprise me to find out that he was played by Edward Norton, of whom I had heard much and whom I'd never actually seen in a film. I was more surprised to discover that his character, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, was in fact real. I think that's wonderful. Even if the silver mask was fictitious.) If I have to pick a Ridley Scott film, I still think my money's on Blade Runner or Alien—or even Gladiator, if the choice is between historical epics—but Kingdom of Heaven was a flawed film, not a total disaster. If nothing else, it may be the only movie I've ever seen where the climactic siege of a city is solved not through heroic and extraordinary defense, but through negotiation and surrender: where the city is, in fact, taken. And it is awarded extra points for being rated R for "strong violence and epic warfare."
Alexander, however . . . Primarily this film has left me with a strong desire to get my copy of Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven back from my father's friend Maria (who did lend me Funeral Games in exchange) so that I can fix my brain, and failing that I'm going to re-read The Persian Boy tonight and lament the waste of a perfectly beautiful Bagoas* in a film that was a B-movie at best, before it fell entirely off the cliff of reasonable disbelief halfway through the battle in India.** Oh, Christopher Plummer. You must have had gambling debts.
Out of all the characters, I think Angelina Jolie as Olympias fared best because she took the high camp and ran with it, snakes and accent and Oedipal complex and all. I don't even know where to begin with the rest. The Saint Crispin's Day speech at Gaugamela? The subtitles that helpfully inform us we're looking at "The Macedonian Left" or "Babylon, Persia"? The total confusion of important characters, so that after an hour and a half we were still trying to figure out which of Alexander's commanders were which? (I could tell Kleitos straight off for his dark hair—"the Black"—and Antigonos because, well, Monophthalmos, but beyond those obvious characteristics . . .) The absolute inability of Colin Farrell's Alexander to demonstrate the kind of charisma that leads sensible Macedonian soldiers to march tens of thousands of miles into the unknown world because their king believes he can? I'm not necessarily faulting the actor; God knows he got no help from the script. But you need someone like Peter O'Toole as T.E. Lawrence, crazy and glittering and intense: the dimension of myth, not mortals. I really did like the underground red-and-black-figure paintings of the bloodier Greek myths that Philip shows the young Alexander by torchlight—Hesiod's Theogony by way of Lascaux. The reconstruction of the Ištar Gate at Babylon was very cool. And whoever they cast for Bagoas, as I said, I instantly believed in the role: but he had far too little to do. I know, I know, Oliver Stone was not interested in making a film of The Persian Boy. But since other scenes, such as Philip's drunken near-rape of Olympias as witnessed by a wide-eyed child Alexander, were nicked right out of Mary Renault, couldn't he have spared us some of the pain and simply adapted her books? The script would have sucked ten times less, I promise. It could hardly have sucked more.
I suppose the night wasn't a dead loss. Kingdom of Heaven, as I've said, wasn't a terrible film—although I'm not sure how much it just benefited by comparison. And we did mock Alexander mercilessly for a good two hours, after which we were reduced to whimpers of disbelief and fruitless pleas for death. (
hans_the_bold classified Alexander as a meteor movie: when you just want a meteor to smack through the scenery and kill all the characters; or, failing that, fall on you so that you don't have to see the rest of the film.) But it is a sad statement when you realize that The Fall of the Roman Empire could only be a step up in film quality. At the very least, it has Christopher Plummer in a better role than Aristotle.*I fail to see why Greece objected to the portrayal of Alexander's bisexuality: in this film, it was almost nonexistent. If we are meant to believe that Roxane, for example, views Hephaistion as a serious rival for Alexander's sexual and political affections, then we need more than soulful eye contact and a few over-the-shoulder clinches between the Patroklos and Achilles of Macedonia—especially against Alexander and Roxane's knock-down, drag-out lovemaking. Also, if a film contains the line "It was said later that Alexander was never defeated in his lifetime, except by Hephaistion's thighs," it had damn well better be prepared to deliver on the promise of hot thigh-conquering action.
**We concluded that it had jumped the elephant.
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