Oliver Stone's critically mauled film about Alexander the Great has its London premiere tonight. Sean Clarke finds the best links on the Macedonian conqueror
Colin Farrell as Alexander Public domain

1. Oliver Stone's Alexander has its London premiere tonight in Leicester Square. The movie stars Colin Farrell as the Macedonian warrior king from the fourth century BC.

2. That's Macedonian from Macedon, an ancient kingdom centred on territory now largely in northern Greece. Both Greece and the neighbouring Republic of Macedonia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, like to claim Alexander as their own, and the new film has only poured salt in the wound. Whatever you do, don't tell a Macedonian Alexander was Greek, or vice versa.

3. Of course, that's not the only reason the film has upset people. A group of Greek lawyers threatened legal action over insinuations in the film that Alexander might have been homosexual. They hadn't seen it at the time, but never let that get in the way of a good lawsuit.

4. Even the Iranians have had a bit of a gripe, in the name of their ancestors the Persians, whose empire was conquered by the Greek/Macedonian gay/straight king/legend*. (*Delete according to your preconceptions).

5. And it's not as though Stone hasn't done his best to make his film accurate. He hired a number of historical and archaeological consultants, one of whom waived his fee so long as he could take part in a cavalry charge.

6. In fact, we should probably congratulate Stone on getting the movie made at all. A rival project by Australian director Baz Luhrmann was abandoned earlier this year. One commentator has speculated that Stone's film may have killed off the whole classical epic genre.

7. But whatever we unkindly Brits can say about Stone, we are as ever but shadows of his compatriots. US critics savaged the movie. "Alexander is full of brilliant highlights," said one. "But they're all in Colin Farrell's hair."

8. Stone struggled manfully at first to defend his movie, with the pricelessly haughty argument that it was too complex for "conventional minds".

9. This week, though, the director has conceded that he "let Alexander down". You have to feel sorry for him: "The gays lambasted me for not making Alexander openly homosexual, and in the Bible belt, pastors were up in the pulpit saying that to watch this film was to be tempted by Satan."

10. It's a minefield, all right. But before we Brits get too smug about everyone else's historical sensibilities, we should look to the dark clouds on the horizon. Mel Gibson's new project is reportedly a biopic of the British queen Boudicca. That's Britain the first century Roman province, not the 18th century union of England and Scotland. But don't let's start all that again, eh?