Well, for starters, she planted the seeds for a major Oedipus complex and stage-mothered him into trampling across Western Asia, Persia and parts of India. At the same time, Alexander sometimes fails to go far enough: His bisexuality is merely suggested. He tells his lifelong friend, Hephaistion (Jared Leto), that he loves and needs him more than anyone else in the world, and Hephaistion responds that he's jealous of losing Alexander to the worlds he's conquering. But that's it. Like Matt, the lone gay character on Melrose Place, Alexander gets to give and receive meaningful glances and heartfelt hugs, and he shares a quick kiss with a servant boy. But it's almost as if Stone was afraid of alienating much of his audience with an all-male love scene. (Alexander does get it on during his wedding night, though, after marrying exotic dancer Roxane, played by Rosario Dawson.) Considering that he's supposedly the most important person in Alexander's life, though, Hephaistion gets little to do: Leto is Farnsworth to Farrell's P. Diddy, though his long, stringy hair and permanent eye liner make him look more like Ozzy Osbourne. He's at Alexander's side for the film's two major battles -- the first, against the Persians in the CGI-laden Battle of Gaugmela; the second, a gritty, magenta-hued forest fight against Indian warriors sitting atop armoured elephants. Just when things get going, though, Stone drags the film's energy to a halt by returning repeatedly to Alexander's ally Ptolemy, now aged and played by Anthony Hopkins, toddling around barefoot in a white tunic and deifying his buddy years later while surveying an incredibly fake-looking harbour of Alexandria. "A friend to man, he changed the world," Ptolemy recalls, ever the reverent narrator. In today's vernacular, we'd say he was a uniter, not a divider.-Christinne Lemirre.