Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ancient Warfare Magazine podcast. I can't remember who

came up with this idea, but we thought we'd take a look at Oliver Stone's 2004 movie, Alexander,

of which there seems to be four versions. A theatrical cut, a director's cut, the final cut, and

the ultimate cut. It's a big film with a $155 million budget and Wikipedia tells me it grossed $167 million.

It was apparently popular in Europe and yet in the US it had a critical reception.

Joining me to talk Alexander, Yaspiroperotage, Mark McCaffrey, Mary

Darm, Mike Cole and Mark DeSantis. We had lots of responses when I posted we were going to

look at Alexander and many were more favourable than certainly I'd expected. I thought we'd start with authenticity.

Now this is something Mary that you mentioned when we were thinking about the film

beforehand and it's something one of our patrons, David, suggested.

He highlights that Oliver Stone attempts at accuracy in terms of armour, weapons and tactics.

But David would be interested to hear from the team whether it actually was accurate in this area.

Well, Mary?

I think one of the things we normally talk about with ancient history films is how they get the look wrong. So the armour's the wrong armour

or the architecture's the wrong architecture or something's off with the physical look of the

costuming. And in Alexander, the look of the film is actually remarkably good and it's very

hard to fault any of the the costuming

and the uniforms and the weaponry and things there's a there's a couple of things that are not

quite uh you know the the bronze for instance is a little bit dulled i think that the

the cedonians were probably shinier than they are in the film.

But that's, for the most part. But that's contrary to everything that we usually see,

where we usually point out that everyone was too shiny.

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