Product Description

Academy award winning director Oliver Stone presents a breathtaking new cut of his sweeping epic film, ALEXANDER, the true story of the world's greatest warrior. Using new footage and dramatically reshaping dozens of scenes, he brings to life the overpowering forces and fierce personalities that forever changed history. Torn by the war between his parents (Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer), Alexander (Colin Farrell) left Greece to face massive armies in Persia, Afghanistan and India -- and was never defeated. "Fortune favors the bold" Stone powerfully demonstrates in this bold new film, ALEXANDER DIRECTOR'S CUT.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary:Oliver Stone
Documentaries

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1948 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2005-08-02
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.25 pounds
• Running time: 167 minutes

Amazon.com
For better or worse (and in this case, it's mostly for better), Oliver Stone's Alexander Revisited should stand as the definitive version of Stone's much-maligned epic about the great Asian conqueror. Following the DVD release of his previous Director's Cut, Stone offers a video introduction here, explaining why he felt a third and final attempt at refining his film was necessary. Essentially, he's using this opportunity to re-create the "road show" format of the Biblical epics of the 1950s and '60s, with a three-and-a-half-hour running time (with an intermission at the two-hour mark) including 45 minutes of previously unseen footage. Stone has also significantly restructured the film, resulting in substantial (if not exactly redemptive) improvements in its narrative flow. Alexander (played in a torrent of emotions by Colin Farrell) is dying as the film opens, his final moments serving to bookend the film's epic story, which incorporates flashback sequences to flesh out the Macedonian king's back-story involving the turbulent battle of fate between his father, King Philip (Val Kilmer) and his scheming sorceress mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie, ridiculous accent and all), who insists that Alexander is literally a child of the gods.

In Stone's final cut, epic battles remain chaotic (although Alexander's strategy is somewhat easier to follow, with on-screen titles indicating left, right, and center during his army's greatest maneuvers) and the ultra-violent battles are more graphically gory than ever (hence their "unrated" status). The animalistic lovemaking of Alexander and his barbarian bride Roxana (Rosario Dawson) is slightly extended (with Dawson as ravishing as ever), and Stone's additional footage also improves the overall arc of Alexander's relationship with his closest generals and male companions, although his most intimate homosexual encounters remain mostly discreet. As Alexander Revisited makes clear, the film's weaknesses remain unavoidable, but Stone deserves credit for recognizing how a longer running time, and more disciplined narrative structure, would bring Alexander closer to the respect it never earned from critics and filmgoers alike. This is unquestionably a better film than it used to be, leaving us to wonder why it took three separate efforts to shape Alexander into its best possible presentation. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
Beware the long-cherished project. That is one of the lessons handed down by Oliver Stone's bio-pic of Alexander the Great, upon which the director has ruminated for many years. Somebody less obsessed by the undertaking might have given us less to laugh about; as things stand, we gaze at Colin Farrell, in the leading role, and wonder if Alexander was impelled to reach the limits of the known world purely in order to forget the tragedy of his wig. Farrell looks deeply grieved in his part, as does Jared Leto, who has the unhappy task of portraying Hephaistion, the general's abiding lover. The story, narrated by the aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) and unfolding in flashback, takes us from a princely boyhood in Macedonia, under the raging rule of Val Kilmer, to the rout of Darius at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. (clearly the heart of the picture, with a wild beat), and so on, eastward, all the way to an elephant-infested India. Many viewers will find nearly three hours of plotless history, alternately savage and sluggish, a little hard to stomach, and they will turn with relief to those performers who treat the whole enterprise as the highest form of kitsch-Angelina Jolie, as Alexander's mother, and Rosario Dawson, as his wife. When these two are onscreen, all thoughts of Homeric heroism are flung aside, and we can settle down to enjoy the movie for what it is: the "Showgirls" of the ancient world. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From the Studio
Comes with the paperback guide Barbecue: 101 Essential Tips (ISBN 0756602203).

Customer Reviews

love the movie, hate the product
there are three versions of this movie. the theaterical version. the director's cut - which in this case is shorter and censored instead of the opposite. the extended version which is extended. i loved this movie so much i got the extended version. however. it's the director's cut that has the extras. the extended cut is all movie with no extras. doesn't make good marketing sense. not fair. oh i could go out and buy a blu ray dvd player to take advantage of the full package that offers - but i won't.

Just a little too long
I really liked this movie and it played in 1080p.I think they it could have been a little shorter.The battle scene was well,i can't put it into words.I can't think of how men fought and died like that.Thousands and thousands i wonder if there still burying people today that fought there.Why were most of these men gay or is this just in the movie.

Great Portrayal of a Great Historical Figure!
I loved this movie very much, it was a little bit long, but keep in mind to tell a great story like this one you must keep a open mind and sit down and listen.

WARNING SOME SPOLIERS ARE PRESENT

It starts out with the aged Ptolemy I Soter (Anthony Hopkins), a general, childhood friend of Alexander (Colin Farrell) and ancester of the great Cleopatra. He tells the story of Alexander as he remembers it.

He begins to say that Alexander's mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie)was at the wrath of her abusive, drunk cyclopitic husband King Philip ll (Val Kilmer) of Macadonia. She claimed to have been with the god Dionisis and had Alexander with him. I probably would have claimed it too if I was married to a jerk like Philip. She also played with snakes, which I didn't mind because this is probably just me and all but I thought that the snakes she was playing with were really cute.

Anyways moving on, one faithful day, Philip wants to kill an untrainable horse, and young Alexander, who wants to conquer the known world in the future, wants to train this wild horse and keep him. Philip lets him do so, and it turns out that the horse was afraid of his own shadow, and Alexander got to keep him when he tamed the wild thing. This is a true story too, I read it in my history textbook from school. And then he even bonds with his father too.

But years later Philip takes a young wife and impregnates her, and Philip and Alexader get into a huge fight at the wedding ceremony almost leading Alexander into exile. After his father gets assonated, Philip's young wife and child are killed, and Alexander becomes ruler of all of Macadonia and Greece. He goes on to conquring Egypt, Anatola, which they don't show in the film. Then he conqures the big daddy of them all, the Persian Empire! The king of Perisa Darius lll fled like a little coward, amazing!

Then he goes onto conquiring some of India, which he for some reason couldn't conqure all of. Then at the end of the film he dies of an illness. And the empire was split up by his generals into four parts. It just so happens that Ptolemy I got to rule Egypt.

Also beautiful authintic costums, music, film settings and acting. It also goes into telling about his relashionship with his aparant lover and childhood friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto), which to me seemed more like true love then with his Bacterian wife Roxanna (Rosario Dawson), and I mean that women was a total b----.

And last but not least it goes to tell how power corrupted him just like it did to his father.

But this is a good movie, that is if you are interested in the ancient world along with war. I recommened this movie to just about anyone who can sit through a long movie on a very boring day.