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Other than trashing Alexander's reputation, the movie seems to be a good "interpretation" of military history:
"History Was Just the Half of It
By BOB BAKER
Published: November 14, 2004
LAST year, the Oxford University historian Robin Lane Fox, the author of a much-admired 1973 biography of Alexander the Great, found himself astride a horse, carrying a wooden lance, thundering through the desert dust with scores of mounted companions as Alexander's greatest conquest unfolded.
The setting was an uninhabited stretch of Morocco - far from the Persian village of Gaugamela in present-day Iraq, where the historic battle occurred in 331 B.C. And the messianic warrior Mr. Fox followed wasn't the 25-year-old Alexander but the actor Colin Farrell, who plays the lead in Oliver Stone's "Alexander," which has its premiere on Nov. 24.
Still, as the horses advanced and the cameras rolled, Mr. Fox felt epiphanies flow through him. After decades of researching often-incomplete texts about Alexander's time, he was now empirically testing history.
Yes, he sensed, you could charge with a lance without using stirrups. No, his body told him, you couldn't carry a shield in your other arm while riding. And what of the popular notion that Alexander guided his soldiers with battlefield commands? That, too, felt hollow in the noisy rattle of battle, with dust limiting a cavalryman's vision to the riders on either side. Later, Mr. Fox would become convinced that it was physically possible to run a man through with a lance from the back of a horse without losing the weapon. (Aim for the shoulder.)
"A fantastic experience," said Mr. Fox, an experienced horseman who demanded his on-screen riding appearance as a condition of serving as Mr. Stone's chief historical consultant. "As a historian you're always trying in your mind to imagine how things might have been."
Historical films routinely reinterpret or simply trash history. Indeed, Mr. Stone is a pariah in some quarters for his conspiratorial assertions in "J.F.K." and "Nixon." But the filming of the Battle of Gaugamela appears to have been a more complex experience, one in which there was often no historical consensus, forcing Mr. Stone and his consultants to extrapolate their grand movie reality around an earnest synthesis of the authentic and the plausible, with at least a small dollop of the merely cool.
By putting more than 1,000 actors and extras in classic Macedonian battle formations on the Moroccan desert, along with chariots, horses and camels, Mr. Stone set in motion scores of questions about what it meant to be a soldier two millenniums ago, ranging from massive to technical to trivial: How did Alexander trick a Persian army four times the size of his 50,000-man force into stretching its flanks until a convenient hole opened? Why didn't the lethal scythe-wheeled chariots of Darius, the Persian king, do more damage? How fast could a syntagma of soldiers (16 rows of 16 men) move while carrying 16-foot-long, steel-tipped spears known as sarissas? Did infantrymen wear socks?
Answering those questions fell largely to two opposites: Mr. Fox, 58, an academic (who is also a newspaper gardening correspondent), and Mr. Stone's longtime military-battle adviser, Dale Dye, a 60-year-old retired Marine captain who is generally skeptical about historical scholarship.
As Mr. Dye had done on many other film sets involving combat - his credits include "The Thin Red Line," "Saving Private Ryan," "Starship Troopers" and Mr. Stone's "Platoon" - he put cast members and extras, including hundreds of Moroccan military men on loan from the government, through a three-week "boot camp" that included sword fighting and practicing with other archaic weapons, as well as nighttime history lectures. The battle they sought to recreate had a mythic quality: Alexander's army had twice before clashed with Darius and won. The third victory spelled the defeat of the Persian Empire, gaining Alexander control of Asia en route to his conquest of 90 percent of the known world - all before his death at 32.
Mr. Dye, who would direct some of the scenes in the 11-minute-long Battle of Gaugamela, was unabashed in suggesting to Mr. Fox that insights gained from putting a mock army into the field would be more credible than the descriptions of historians. Part of the problem - for scholars as well as directors - is that none of the 20 accounts of Alexander's life believed to have been written by his contemporaries have survived. The next closest accounts were written four centuries or more after Alexander's death, according to Mr. Fox, who describes his own Alexander biography as more a "search" for the general than a narrative of his life.
"I don't give a [expletive] about what the ancient sources say," Mr. Dye said in an interview in his suburban Los Angeles home, which doubles as a personal military museum and library. "I went into this in the sole belief that the infantrymen had the same heart and soul in his job as the guy walking around Baghdad now."
Mr. Fox had been retained by Mr. Stone in 2002 after a meeting in which the director, long enamored by the idea of making an Alexander movie, peppered the professor with questions. Mr. Stone, a man famously drawn to audaciousness, agreed to Mr. Fox's request that he be cast in the lead group of Alexander's cavalry. But the director balked at Mr. Fox's other demand: a screen credit that began "And introducing ... ."
"There are two types of Alexander historians," Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. "One group looks back from its own deeply held moral values about international relations and regards Alexander as a person they must reduce to a wanton aggressor. The other group of historians wonder what it was like to be in his entourage and to see with him. I belong more in the second camp; how can you ever know if you never had a chance to charge as part of a massive army without stirrups through the desert riddled with scorpions?"
Mr. Fox acknowledged there were often not enough hard facts to counter Mr. Dye's desire to extrapolate. "We come from two completely different universes," Mr. Fox said. "Dale is a soldier, and I really respect that, I love talking to him, but for him to say 'all those [historians] make it up,' I don't believe that."
One example of Mr. Dye's contribution to the battle can be seen when Alexander's troops "mousetrap" a scythed chariot - a horse-drawn vehicle whose wheels could cut down many infantrymen at once.
Mr. Dye said he was looking for a scene that would illustrate the flexibility of the syntagma formation. He had read that Darius's chariots had not played a role at Gaugamela. Since he had also read that Darius believed his chariots could break the back of Alexander's infantry, Mr. Dye made what he calls "a tactical leap" - inferring that Alexander had created a defensive maneuver.
The scenario, in which Mr. Dye consulted with a cavalry expert who works for his company, Warriors Inc., went like this: When the commander of a syntagma recognized a chariot was rolling toward his men, he would signal them to deploy a trap. The lines of men in the middle of the syntagma would shuffle right or left to create an opening to lure the horses. The animals would be drawn into the gap because the soldiers on both sides of the gap would hold their sarissas in a down position, intimidating the animals. At the end of the gap, the last four rows of infantry had remained in position. On command they would raise their sarissas in an attack position, causing the horses to lurch to a halt. "Skirmishers" outside the syntagma would enter the ranks, gut the horses and kill the Persian riders. The syntagma, its formation intact, would move forward to continue battle.
There is no historical evidence that this tactic was ever used, as Mr. Fox notes in a newly published book about the making of "Alexander." It was just as likely, Mr. Fox suggested, that some infantrymen threw javelins at the chariots or dragged their riders off them. Similarly, Mr. Dye's insistence on using 256-man syntagmas was not historically grounded, Mr. Fox writes. "Nobody knew, because nobody had seen a full phalanx [of syntagmas] in action since Macedon's defeat by Rome in the mid-second century B.C."
Mr. Dye said: "You reach a point where it's anybody's guess, so you apply a 'soldier's template.' Our view is that soldiers aren't stupid. They do what works. That applies to everything from the Peloponnesian Wars to 'Star Wars.' "
Similarly, Mr. Dye inferred - and the battle scene reflects - that Alexander's commanders used a system of bugles or drumbeats, visual signs and messengers to communicate marching orders to each group of 16 soldiers during the fog of war. That is one explanation for the coordination required to execute Alexander's battle strategy at Gaugamela: Feinting an attacking maneuver with his right flank, drawing Darius's soldiers to the Persian left flank and ultimately causing a gap to open in the Persian center. That allowed Alexander's troops to pour through and nearly kill Darius, who fled.
Mr. Stone said the difference in worldviews between Mr. Fox and Mr. Dye was healthy. "If you look at all the sources, they never take you all the way through the battle. To this day I can't answer [what happened]." All the movie can do is "put you there," he said, "the way 'J.F.K.' allowed me to put myself in Dealey Plaza." What he wanted the Gaugamela scene to communicate, Mr. Stone said, was the brilliance of Alexander's strategy (in a 12-minute scene on tactics and preparation the night before the battle), a leader's sense of destiny (Alexander is said to have believed he descended from Zeus) and the foolishness of youth. Riding in the front line in the film, Alexander is knocked off his horse (another extrapolation) and saved by his men.
"It's the madness of life that people sometimes blunder into history," Mr. Stone said. "At Gaugamela, he was a cocky young man. He loses his horse, his life is saved, but he's still going for the gold," by one report coming as close as 25 yards to capturing Darius but stopping when his commanders warned him that to continue the chase could put the rest of his army in jeopardy. "There's a wonderful truth to that,'' Mr. Stone said. "Keep trying."
"History Was Just the Half of It
By BOB BAKER
Published: November 14, 2004
LAST year, the Oxford University historian Robin Lane Fox, the author of a much-admired 1973 biography of Alexander the Great, found himself astride a horse, carrying a wooden lance, thundering through the desert dust with scores of mounted companions as Alexander's greatest conquest unfolded.
The setting was an uninhabited stretch of Morocco - far from the Persian village of Gaugamela in present-day Iraq, where the historic battle occurred in 331 B.C. And the messianic warrior Mr. Fox followed wasn't the 25-year-old Alexander but the actor Colin Farrell, who plays the lead in Oliver Stone's "Alexander," which has its premiere on Nov. 24.
Still, as the horses advanced and the cameras rolled, Mr. Fox felt epiphanies flow through him. After decades of researching often-incomplete texts about Alexander's time, he was now empirically testing history.
Yes, he sensed, you could charge with a lance without using stirrups. No, his body told him, you couldn't carry a shield in your other arm while riding. And what of the popular notion that Alexander guided his soldiers with battlefield commands? That, too, felt hollow in the noisy rattle of battle, with dust limiting a cavalryman's vision to the riders on either side. Later, Mr. Fox would become convinced that it was physically possible to run a man through with a lance from the back of a horse without losing the weapon. (Aim for the shoulder.)
"A fantastic experience," said Mr. Fox, an experienced horseman who demanded his on-screen riding appearance as a condition of serving as Mr. Stone's chief historical consultant. "As a historian you're always trying in your mind to imagine how things might have been."
Historical films routinely reinterpret or simply trash history. Indeed, Mr. Stone is a pariah in some quarters for his conspiratorial assertions in "J.F.K." and "Nixon." But the filming of the Battle of Gaugamela appears to have been a more complex experience, one in which there was often no historical consensus, forcing Mr. Stone and his consultants to extrapolate their grand movie reality around an earnest synthesis of the authentic and the plausible, with at least a small dollop of the merely cool.
By putting more than 1,000 actors and extras in classic Macedonian battle formations on the Moroccan desert, along with chariots, horses and camels, Mr. Stone set in motion scores of questions about what it meant to be a soldier two millenniums ago, ranging from massive to technical to trivial: How did Alexander trick a Persian army four times the size of his 50,000-man force into stretching its flanks until a convenient hole opened? Why didn't the lethal scythe-wheeled chariots of Darius, the Persian king, do more damage? How fast could a syntagma of soldiers (16 rows of 16 men) move while carrying 16-foot-long, steel-tipped spears known as sarissas? Did infantrymen wear socks?
Answering those questions fell largely to two opposites: Mr. Fox, 58, an academic (who is also a newspaper gardening correspondent), and Mr. Stone's longtime military-battle adviser, Dale Dye, a 60-year-old retired Marine captain who is generally skeptical about historical scholarship.
As Mr. Dye had done on many other film sets involving combat - his credits include "The Thin Red Line," "Saving Private Ryan," "Starship Troopers" and Mr. Stone's "Platoon" - he put cast members and extras, including hundreds of Moroccan military men on loan from the government, through a three-week "boot camp" that included sword fighting and practicing with other archaic weapons, as well as nighttime history lectures. The battle they sought to recreate had a mythic quality: Alexander's army had twice before clashed with Darius and won. The third victory spelled the defeat of the Persian Empire, gaining Alexander control of Asia en route to his conquest of 90 percent of the known world - all before his death at 32.
Mr. Dye, who would direct some of the scenes in the 11-minute-long Battle of Gaugamela, was unabashed in suggesting to Mr. Fox that insights gained from putting a mock army into the field would be more credible than the descriptions of historians. Part of the problem - for scholars as well as directors - is that none of the 20 accounts of Alexander's life believed to have been written by his contemporaries have survived. The next closest accounts were written four centuries or more after Alexander's death, according to Mr. Fox, who describes his own Alexander biography as more a "search" for the general than a narrative of his life.
"I don't give a [expletive] about what the ancient sources say," Mr. Dye said in an interview in his suburban Los Angeles home, which doubles as a personal military museum and library. "I went into this in the sole belief that the infantrymen had the same heart and soul in his job as the guy walking around Baghdad now."
Mr. Fox had been retained by Mr. Stone in 2002 after a meeting in which the director, long enamored by the idea of making an Alexander movie, peppered the professor with questions. Mr. Stone, a man famously drawn to audaciousness, agreed to Mr. Fox's request that he be cast in the lead group of Alexander's cavalry. But the director balked at Mr. Fox's other demand: a screen credit that began "And introducing ... ."
"There are two types of Alexander historians," Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. "One group looks back from its own deeply held moral values about international relations and regards Alexander as a person they must reduce to a wanton aggressor. The other group of historians wonder what it was like to be in his entourage and to see with him. I belong more in the second camp; how can you ever know if you never had a chance to charge as part of a massive army without stirrups through the desert riddled with scorpions?"
Mr. Fox acknowledged there were often not enough hard facts to counter Mr. Dye's desire to extrapolate. "We come from two completely different universes," Mr. Fox said. "Dale is a soldier, and I really respect that, I love talking to him, but for him to say 'all those [historians] make it up,' I don't believe that."
One example of Mr. Dye's contribution to the battle can be seen when Alexander's troops "mousetrap" a scythed chariot - a horse-drawn vehicle whose wheels could cut down many infantrymen at once.
Mr. Dye said he was looking for a scene that would illustrate the flexibility of the syntagma formation. He had read that Darius's chariots had not played a role at Gaugamela. Since he had also read that Darius believed his chariots could break the back of Alexander's infantry, Mr. Dye made what he calls "a tactical leap" - inferring that Alexander had created a defensive maneuver.
The scenario, in which Mr. Dye consulted with a cavalry expert who works for his company, Warriors Inc., went like this: When the commander of a syntagma recognized a chariot was rolling toward his men, he would signal them to deploy a trap. The lines of men in the middle of the syntagma would shuffle right or left to create an opening to lure the horses. The animals would be drawn into the gap because the soldiers on both sides of the gap would hold their sarissas in a down position, intimidating the animals. At the end of the gap, the last four rows of infantry had remained in position. On command they would raise their sarissas in an attack position, causing the horses to lurch to a halt. "Skirmishers" outside the syntagma would enter the ranks, gut the horses and kill the Persian riders. The syntagma, its formation intact, would move forward to continue battle.
There is no historical evidence that this tactic was ever used, as Mr. Fox notes in a newly published book about the making of "Alexander." It was just as likely, Mr. Fox suggested, that some infantrymen threw javelins at the chariots or dragged their riders off them. Similarly, Mr. Dye's insistence on using 256-man syntagmas was not historically grounded, Mr. Fox writes. "Nobody knew, because nobody had seen a full phalanx [of syntagmas] in action since Macedon's defeat by Rome in the mid-second century B.C."
Mr. Dye said: "You reach a point where it's anybody's guess, so you apply a 'soldier's template.' Our view is that soldiers aren't stupid. They do what works. That applies to everything from the Peloponnesian Wars to 'Star Wars.' "
Similarly, Mr. Dye inferred - and the battle scene reflects - that Alexander's commanders used a system of bugles or drumbeats, visual signs and messengers to communicate marching orders to each group of 16 soldiers during the fog of war. That is one explanation for the coordination required to execute Alexander's battle strategy at Gaugamela: Feinting an attacking maneuver with his right flank, drawing Darius's soldiers to the Persian left flank and ultimately causing a gap to open in the Persian center. That allowed Alexander's troops to pour through and nearly kill Darius, who fled.
Mr. Stone said the difference in worldviews between Mr. Fox and Mr. Dye was healthy. "If you look at all the sources, they never take you all the way through the battle. To this day I can't answer [what happened]." All the movie can do is "put you there," he said, "the way 'J.F.K.' allowed me to put myself in Dealey Plaza." What he wanted the Gaugamela scene to communicate, Mr. Stone said, was the brilliance of Alexander's strategy (in a 12-minute scene on tactics and preparation the night before the battle), a leader's sense of destiny (Alexander is said to have believed he descended from Zeus) and the foolishness of youth. Riding in the front line in the film, Alexander is knocked off his horse (another extrapolation) and saved by his men.
"It's the madness of life that people sometimes blunder into history," Mr. Stone said. "At Gaugamela, he was a cocky young man. He loses his horse, his life is saved, but he's still going for the gold," by one report coming as close as 25 yards to capturing Darius but stopping when his commanders warned him that to continue the chase could put the rest of his army in jeopardy. "There's a wonderful truth to that,'' Mr. Stone said. "Keep trying."
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