Alexander Director's Cut

The Director's Cut of Alexander starts with Alexander's death and the introduction of the narrator, Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's military leaders and friends and is telling the story forty years after Alexander's death.  After this, the story starts early on in Alexander's life and, although it does jump around a lot, is told in a mostly chronological order with timelapses being indicated by captions how far back or forward in time the story was jumping.

This version seems to mostly focus on the battles and politics of Alexander's life and ignores a lot of his personal relationships.  We see enough to get a good idea of what his relationships with his mother and father were like, but not much of his relationships with his men or his wife.  Trying to figure out who's who amongst his generals is difficult because, a lot of the time, either multiple people are being spoken to, or they are simply being spoken about and a face is not given to go with the name.  His relationship with Hephaestion is almost completely cut from this version of the movie, and when there is any mention or hint of a relationship between them, it pretty much comes out of nowhere and makes no sense because the scenes that tell the audience who Hephaestion is aren't there.  We see Alexander struggle with his mother's control and his desire to make his father proud, but this seems to be the extent of what we see regarding Alexander's personal life and relationships.

The decision to start with Alexander's childhood and continue in a mostly chronological order, I think, hurts the movie because it takes so long for anything truly exciting to happen.  Most of the scenes set during Alexander's childhood would be better served as flashbacks since they don't really help along the plot, but rather provide a bit of a backstory.

Throughout the movie, we are shown evidence of Alexander's greatness: his refusal to steal a victory over his enemies by attacking in the night; how he rides into battle with his men instead of giving orders from the back; how he agrees to treat the Persian princess and her family as royalty even though he has conquered their people; and that he gives conquered lands back to their kings as a way to gain allies, among other things.

Overall, I thought this version was horrible.  Individual scenes by themselves were good, but as a whole, I had the hardest time getting through this version.  There wasn't really a lot that captured and held my interest and the timeline was confusing because dates were not given for the most part, the audience is simply told that a scene is '9 years earlier' or '40 years later' and there are enough time jumps that this becomes quite confusing.