Alexander, Spiderman, Star Wars

I made the mistake of watching a documentary on Alexander the Great before I watched the Oliver Stone movie “Alexander”. Now I know where the movie took liberties. The movie presents Alexander as completely innocent of his father’s murder, although historians are skeptical. But historians don’t even know if Alexander was gay or not.

The movie ignored the fact that Alexander initially fought alongside his father Philip. Alexander saved the day with a daring charge. But he wasn’t rewarded for it, and that caused a schism between father and son. So in real life Alexander killed his dad. The movie misses that battle entirely. Then after a brief historical monologue, he’s suddenly in control over half of Asia.

Some of the real life things that Alexander did, if shown in a Hollywood production, would simply not be believed. He rode at the front of his cavalry during attacks. He’d also be decked out with some garish antennae on his helmet. Why someone who presents such an obvious target wasn’t just wacked immediately is not believable, but it was true. He once managed to get within a few feet of the Persian king Darius, who more conventionally sat at the back of his lines, surrounded by an army of personal guards. Again, most of this wasn’t in the movie.

Alexander destroyed the Persians when outnumbered six to one, while taking an astonishingly low 100 casualties. He once invaded a city, got drunk and ordered it burned it to the ground. The next day he was like “I said THAT? Aw, man!” Another time, Alexander was laid siege to a walled city. He got to the top of the wall, turned around, and found that all his troops were still at the bottom. Instead of regrouping, he jumps forward into combat alone. When they found Alexander, he had an arrow to his lung, from which he survived, but never fully recovered. Truth is stranger than fiction, everyone knows, but you can still present it. Instead, the movie shows Alex getting zinged by a random arrow in a jungle battle.

Genghis Khan is probably going to be the next historical figure for a big budget movie, he’s ripe for it. Great conqueror, growing Asian market. Genghis, your time has come.
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For yet another years-too-late movie review, I saw Spiderman 3. It’s sort of a jumbled mass of plotlines, none of which were apparently good enough to take center stage. Spidey is covered by some alien thing that crawled out of a meteor. Very 1950s sci-fi. But what are the chances that the same guy who got bit by the one radioactive spider in the world also gets covered with the only alien entity that fell to Earth?

So Peter Parker brings a little bit of this gooey alien thing to his professor of indeterminable field of science. He’s a professor, darn it – like the guy on Gilligan’s Island. A little bit of goo is flopping around on the table, and the prof advises Pete to “Stay away from that. It appears to have properties of a symbiote.” And we know this how?

There’s also this guy who can turn into sand. As the guy is turning into sand for the first time, we see a zoom in to his DNA, which is changing from the double helix to some crystalline-looking helix. Never mind that at a molecular level, crystals don’t look like crystals, they look like molecules. And, they’re never arranged in helixes, they’re arranged in crystalline lattices, which would explain why they are called crystals and why they look like crystals.

But anyway, back to the alien symbiote, the “professor” (and Maryann!) has done some lab work, and the results are in. The symbiote enhances the qualities of the host, especially aggression. How do we know this? We’re treated to the microscope view. There are a bunch of human red blood cells and one little alien black cell that is punching them. I swear I’m not making that up, but I wish I were.

Peter Parker is also battling a cheesey dude who is trying to muscle in on Peter’s turf at the Daily Bugle. Yeah, two photographers go to war over the lowest position at the newspaper, like all those people who fight over positions as the Wal-Mart greeter.

The culmination of all the Spider-nonsense is that the alien can be defeated by the sound of clanging metal. There was a Twilight Zone episode where some braggart told impossible tall tales of his heroism that no one really believed. One day he was picked up by aliens and he defeated them by playing his harmonica. Obviously, this was also not believed by anyone he told. Spiderman, however, tries to pass this ridiculous plot point on to the viewer as clever cinema.

I know. At any movie where the titular character wears spandex, I should just check my brain at the door. But I read graphic novels that are thought provoking and erudite. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman lay down some seriously great literature.
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Star Wars was a great movie, but when you watch it again and again, no good guy with a name ever dies.