"Alexander" is so full of great images, fine acting and masterful war sequences that the final product is a letdown of epic proportions. While considering "what could have been" is fun, such consideration fails to cover up the fact that Oliver Stone's disjointed mess does not live up to the individual efforts put forth in this film. The talented Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer give sharp performances as Alexander's mother and father, and the computer designer who conceived the sprawling, marble-festooned Babylon will undoubtedly be considered for an Academy Award. However, the film fails to ever gain a solid flow and instead lurches awkwardly between great and mediocre scenes.

Narrated by an aging Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), the film follows the life of Alexander (Colin Farrell), focusing not only on his great conquests across the known world but also on the personal relationships that haunt Alexander during every step of his journey. We follow Alexander on a massive eight-year military campaign as he confronts Persians, chases fleeing enemies over hundreds of miles and eventually crosses the Himalayans into India for his final battles. Enormous sections of his life are given only lip service such as his ascension to the throne and his establishment of Alexandria in Egypt, which encompassed 48 out of his 50 great battles. But great attention is given to discussions with his mother, his war council and his best friend and lover Hephaistion (Jared Leto).

Farrell turns in a solid performance as the title character but lacks the madman zeal needed to portray someone with the unparalleled vision of Alexander. Farrell seems determined and even passionate at times, but his Alexander never reaches the fevered pitch of Mel Gibson's William Wallace or Kirk Douglass' Spartacus. Sometimes Alexander is a compassionate humanitarian, fighting under the banner of freeing oppressed peoples, but at other times he is ruthless and paranoid, attempting to rape his newlywed wife and executing his closest staff for fear of mutiny. Throughout, he struggles to balance his homosexual lust and love with his desire to have a wife and heirs. He is also haunted by his Oedipal relationship with his mother, who claims he is the son of Zeus, and his power-hungry, violent father, whom he both admires and constantly strives to outdo.

The real problem with this movie is the sheer breadth of topics that Stone tries to cover, and the interesting questions that he leaves completely untouched. A great deal of screen time is devoted to Alexander and Hephaision's passionate and obviously homoerotic relationship, yet they never kiss on screen, and the sole love scene is a heterosexual one between Alexander and his barbarian wife, Roxanne (Rosario Dawson). Considering the disproportionate amount of homosexual sex the film implies that Alexander has, it seems unbalanced for the sole sexually explicit scene to be between a man and a woman.

Additionally, the movie places great importance on the heroes of the past who heavily influenced Alexander, but never allows Farrell to flesh out a believable motivation for Alexander's military aspirations. The first of the two battle scenes, while spectacular in scope, suffers because of Stone's incomprehensible attempt to explain phalanx formation with subtitles. And while even Brad Pitt's Achilles could muster stirring speeches, Farrell's pre-battle speech as Alexander seemed a derivation of every inspirational speech ever written. Farrell bumbles through telling the common troops that it is better to die free than to live in slavery ("Braveheart"), and that death in battle is immortality ("Troy"). Furthermore, Stone never explains how Alexander manages to garner loyalty in his army and people, since his top advisors are always at odds with him and his personal charisma barely extends beyond Farrell's obsidian-swimming eyes.

The strongest section of this lengthy movie (it clocks in at a shade under three hours) is the India campaign, filmed in the lush jungles of Thailand. Here, the movie achieves some of its most poignant and exciting moments, from the brief and one-sided battle with monkeys, to the high profile encounter with war elephants.

It is during this portion of the movie that Alexander encounters the most adversity from both within and without, and his attempts to lead a begrudging army into battle make for some of the most realistic dialogue and relationships the film achieves.

However, Stone continually loses momentum in bizarre, out-of-place flashbacks and an over-dependence on Hopkins' narration to move the story along. The result is a movie full of dynamic relationships and eye-popping moments that disappointingly fails to achieve greatness. Alexander is fond of quoting Virgil by saying "Fortune favors the bold." However, in movies fortune tends to favor the coherent and concise, and Stone's movie, by and large, is neither.