So instead, he goes in the exact opposite direction with equally disastrous results. First, there is an elaborate death scene where we see someone, we’re guessing Alexander (although Stone does not show us his face) dying, having not made an important decision of some sort. Everyone around the bed pleads with the dying man as strong winds blow outside and the dying man stares wildly and flails his hands and then expires. Before we have any idea what the hell that was all about, Stone then jumps forward 40 years, after Alexander’s empire has collapsed, and there’s Anthony Hopkins in a toga on a balcony near the harbor at Alexandria (we can tell it’s Alexandria because we can see the Lighthouse of Alexandria in the background) telling a scribe the story of Alexander, but not about the mysterious death scene we just watched. We’re still waiting to find out what was going on during the death scene and Hopkins is giving us a history lesson.

Now, Stone doesn’t want to give us a history lesson so he renders the dialogue through Hopkins’s character, a guy who apparently worked alongside Alexander, although we don’t know how or in what manner. Hopkins speaks of Alexander with great love, so we get that Alexander was apparently loved, but the rest of it is still just a history lesson about a bunch of people we haven’t met yet. Hopkins wanders around his back porch overlooking the harbor, and the porch is covered with Greek statuary that Hopkins fondles as he walks past. We’re supposed to be taking notes on his history lesson, but instead we’re wondering who Hopkins is and why he’s telling us all this and why he’s got a back porch covered with statuary.

After he’s wandered around his back porch for a while, Hopkins then heads inside, where there is what looks to be an Alexander Museum in his living room. There are more statues, and elaborate displays and maps and mosaics. Hopkins launches into some serious history here gesturing to this statue and that map, telling us all the same things we would have read in the text-on-black version, but instead of understanding the information we’re more lost than ever, because we’re still wondering what the death scene was all about and then we’re wondering who Hopkins is supposed to be (since he’s obviously not the elderly Alexander) and we’re wondering why he’s telling someone the story of Alexander and we’re wondering why he’s walking around his Alexander Museum gesturing to things that the guy he’s talking to already knows about. We’re now about ten minutes into the movie and we’re still waiting for it to start.

Then, just as we’re catching up to whatever the heck Anthony Hopkins is talking about, we jump back in time and now Alexander is alive and well and he’s in a tent somewhere in a desert just before a big battle of some kind against some Persians, and he’s making battle plans with his team of generals. And we think “Finally! The movie’s starting!” But no. Instead of getting some drama, we get yet another history lesson, as Alexander tells his generals all about the upcoming battle and how they’re going to win it. We don’t know where we are, why we’re fighting, who anyone in the tent is or what is at stake, we’re just getting Alexander lecturing his generals on strategy.  

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yesterday mentioned the “As you know, Bob” problem in narratives, and that’s what this scene is, one big long “As you know, Bob” scene. Except it’s worse, because there’s, like, six of them, and their names aren’t Bob, they’re Ptolemy and Hephaistion and Cassander and Antigonus. So you’ve got Alexander walking around the map room pointing at things and saying things like “As you know, Antigonus, you are my most trusted warrior…” These lines are there so that the Greek scholars in the house can nod in understanding and say “Aha, so that’s Antigonus, got it…” but the rest of us are just burdened with more and more information we have no idea what to do with. The scene is supposed to help us understand the big battle scene we’re about to see, but it does the opposite. Because we’re still wondering about the death scene and who Anthony Hopkins was and why he has an Alexander Museum in his living room and who all these people in the tent are supposed to be and the movie is already 15 or 20 minutes along.

We finally head out into the big battle scene, and it is very big indeed — enormous, sprawling, ridiculously elaborate. It is, in fact, so elaborate that each section of the army gets its own title card so we know where we are in the battle. Unfortunately, we’re still not following any of it because we couldn’t follow the strategy session in the tent earlier. So now there’s a hugely chaotic battle sequence featuring tens of thousands of extras in period battle gear, but we don’t know what the objective is or who they are really or what they’re fighting for or why any of this is important.

Compare this to the opening of Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan opens with an old man in a military cemetery in France with his family. One shot of one French flag tells us we’re in France. The old man comes to a field of gravestones and collapses in tears. There is no dialogue, no museum, no scrolling text, no narrator telling us about the history of World War II, no newsreel catchingus up to the story so far, no history lesson, no room of generals discussing strategy and reminding each other of things they already know. There is an old man who is grief-stricken at the sight of a field of gravestones and that’s it.

Then, we cut to the past, where an army captain is on a boat with a bunch of other soldiers and is about to storm a beach. We think the captain is the younger version of the old man at the cemetery (the narrative, it turns out, hinges on this deliberate misdirect). The men on the boat are terrified and nauseous and the captain’s hands are shaking. A title card tells us that it’s June 6. 1944 and that we’re at Omaha Beach. It doesn’t say that it’s D-Day, an important turning point in World War II, nothing tells us who the soldiers are fighting, or why this beach is important — and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the simple physical predicament of the protagonist. The captain in the boat has a bunch of men in his charge and it’s his job to get them up the beach and kill the enemy. And that’s it. He gives no speech about the glories of freedom or the evils of Nazism, the information he gives them is technical and sparse. The tension is palpable, the concerns are immediate and physical, not historical and philosophical. Then, the front of the boat drops down and half the men in the boat are slaughtered by sniper fire, and the ensuing 25 minutes of insane, mind-shattering carnage go on to become the greatest battle sequence ever shot and one of the great opening sequences of all time. We still don’t know who anybody is (except that the captain is Tom Hanks and we like Tom Hanks), there is no dialogue where the captain says to a soldier “As you know, Billy, you are my most accurate sniper…” The captain and his team that we will follow through the rest of the movie are revealed solely by their actions.

Oliver Stone sincerely thought he was doing us a favor by giving us all this complicated information about the history of Alexander before we ever got a look at the guy, and he thought he was demonstrating his generosity and good will toward the audience by dramatising the exposition instead of just putting some text up on the screen. But instead he shot his movie in the foot before it even got started, he drew the exposition out to painful lengths and made us more confused than ever. We don’t learn anything from Stone’s prologue, our minds check out after the first minute and by the tenth minute we’ve forgotten why we came to see the movie. Spielberg knew that none of that matters — cinema is about the here and now, the simple physical predicament of the protagonist.

UPDATE:

nearside

 points out in the comments that Alexander and Saving Private Ryan describe two different historical scenarios, one of which the audience might be expected to be familiar with, the other not so much.  I will go further: the two movies belong to two different genres — Alexander is a biographical drama and Saving Private Ryan is a war movie — and so perhaps should not be judged side by side.  Fair enough, let’s compare an apple to an apple.  Alexander begins with its elaborate history lesson and Schindler’s List begins with its protagonist getting dressed for a night on the town — again, little historical context (we know only that Jews are being concentrated into cities), no scroll of text, no narrator telling us who these people are, just the immediate physical concerns of the protagonist — he’s getting dressed up for a night on the town — we never even see his face! — and his ensemble is complete when he places his Nazi pin on his lapel.  The sequence that follows — Schindler impressing the local Nazi officers at the nightclub — lays out the information we need to know about Schindler and nothing else.  The result is that for the first 20 minutes of Schindler we lean forward, wanting to know more about the protagonist and what he’s after, whereas the first 20 minutes of Alexander make us lean back, wanting to get out of this classroom.