The king then drove his army further east than they had ever ventured, to the provinces of Bactria and Sogdiana. After his conquests there, Alexander married Roxane, daughter of the most powerful chieftain in that region of Persia. Although rooted in his teacher Aristotle’s proclamations of the essential superiority of the Hellenic culture and religion, Alexander ultimately challenged Aristotle’s notions of racial purity by encouraging his soldiers to marry women in conquered territories, setting the example himself by taking Roxane as his first wife. The film captures the exotic majesty of their union, reflecting Alexander’s desire to meld Greek culture with those of his conquered nations.
Alexander next turned towards India, a land that held many astonishing sights for the Macedonians. In the film, a fierce forest conflict pits Alexander’s army against Indian troops, with the soldiers facing dramatic weather, a landscape inhospitable to their military formations, and most incredibly, war elephants – the Macedonians had never encountered anything akin to the giant beasts that the Indian soldiers employed in combat.
Alexander’s ambition inspired him to push further east, towards the Ganges River, but his exhausted and increasingly belligerent army refused to go on. After weathering a near-mutiny, he led them south, engaging in numerous smaller conflicts before finally returning to Babylon. A short time later, it was there that Alexander died of an unexplained illness, in June of 323 BC.
Alexander the Great conquered the known world not only with military genius, but perhaps even more importantly, the power of his ideas. In his 11,000-mile march, Alexander sought not to destroy, but to re-invent each society in the mold of his own vision for a new world, a new people and a new destiny for the entire human race. He dreamed of uniting East and West, of spreading Hellenistic thought and culture throughout the world. Alexander often allowed the local rulers he had defeated to continue to govern their territories. “For instance, in India, he did not find a world of peace and disrupt it,” says Lane Fox. “There were existing local wars and hatreds, and if people surrendered to him, he favored them. If not, he conquered them and killed all the rebels, but he also ended their local hostilities.”
What Alexander accomplished in his near 33 years on earth have reverberated through the centuries, still informing how life is lived not only in the lands he conquered more than two thousand years ago, but even in those he never saw. And now, he lives again in Alexander, Oliver Stone’s epic account of the life of the king who nearly conquered all.
Lane Fox believes that Stone has woven together a fascinating interpretation of the many sides of one of history’s most complex and charismatic leaders. “Epic films about history have been much discussed for showing a ‘Past Imperfect,’ but this neat label is the wrong one to apply,” cautions Lane Fox. “But ‘Perfect history’; does not exist, nor was it ever Oliver’s aim. His aim was an intense drama, not a documentary. The framework of Alexander’s life is a much more fascinating starting-point for such a drama than an ignorant imagination of it. As a result, history is the film-drama’s springboard and gives it force, but fiction is built into it too. We cannot hear Alexander nowadays and we have next to no idea what he said. So a scriptwriter has to invent, and Oliver’s script is a historical fiction. But it is a fiction exceptionally rooted in history.”
"Alexander" will be released on November 24, 2004, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and Intermedia.
