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It is with great pleasure that I announce my first fan edit Alexander: Warrior King a brand-new take on one of the worst movies ever made. Source material for this fan edit is the 2007 blu-ray Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut which at 3 hours and 34 minutes is the longest version of the film ever released. Ironically it was not the “final cut” as a slightly shorter version was released as “The Ultimate Cut” in 2014.
My name is Matt, I am using the handle Kmart Kid. Kmart was the store where I was introduced to many of the comics, VHS tapes, and toys that made up my childhood. Plus, The Karate Kid is one of my favorite movies. I am a production professional, mostly working as a 3D animator and compositor. I edit a little bit in my job but it has primarily been a hobby. Thanks to everyone on this forum and in this community for all of the advice here. I have been a long-time lurker and lover of fan edits. For my own first fan edit, I thought I might as well go for something really bad and see what I could do with it.
In all, I know of seven versions of this movie, including mine:
Alexander: Theatrical Cut (2004) 175 minutes
Alexander: Director’s Cut - (2005) 166 minutes
Alexander: The Spence Edit - the first fan edit (2006) 135 minutes
Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut (2007) 214 minutes
Alexander: The Ultimate Cut (2014) 207 minutes
Alexander: The A-B Cut - a fan edit by Ramapo (2016) 208 minutes
Alexander: Warrior King (2023) 91 minutes
There have been so many official director’s cuts of the movie because Warner Bros. lost their $35 million investment in the theatrical run (but it was a hit on video) so every subsequent release has been a cash grab. IMO, none of the Oliver Stone versions are good and the longer cuts are even worse than the original. However, The Final Cut included more graphic war footage, as well as additional material for a fan editor, so in that regard, I am glad it was released.
I have never seen Spence’s edit of the film (as I can’t find it) but from what I have read on the IFDB it is the closest version to my own. The most recent fan edit, Ramapo’s The A-B Cut is probably the version I would recommend to someone if they wanted to watch Oliver Stone’s version of the movie as all it really changes is to put the scenes in sequential order, as they belong. I could not use his edit as a starting point for my own because he compressed the soundtrack to stereo and I knew that I wanted mine to be in 5.1 surround.
So what is Alexander: Warrior King? In his blog post about the A-B Cut, Ramapo said that his work was a labor of love. Mine, however, is a labor of hate. I hate this movie with a passion and have ever since I first saw it on opening day in 2004. The trailer made it look so awesome like it would be Gladiator on steroids. My dad was an armchair historian and fan of Alexander so I knew the story growing up and it made me even more excited for it. Before release rumors started to trickle out that the film was going to make the famous conqueror gay. This didn’t bother me much as it has been speculated since antiquity that he may have been bisexual. But when I saw the film I was shocked that it was a gay film, as in the gay-themed genre, rather than the sword & sandals genre. His sexuality was not just hinted at, it was the basis for the entire movie.
This is only one of Stone’s strange decisions. In retrospect, I now believe that he did this in an attempt to be culturally relevant and ride the “queer new wave,” a cinematic movement that started in the 1990s. Hilary Swank had won an Oscar for her portrayal of a lesbian trans-man in Boys Don’t Cry a few years earlier and legalized gay marriage was finally on the cusp of happening in the U.S. Yet a gay Alexander movie is not what his investors nor audiences wanted to see. As someone who has gone over this movie frame by frame, I can attest that it is a gay film, aimed at a gay male audience. There are so many male crotch shots that I cannot even recall how many. Stone did throw in a straight sex scene with female nudity, but this seemed just to placate the straight audience.
In my edit, all sexuality has been cut. I counted at least five different love triangles, which are the film’s focus for the majority of the runtime. I thought that out of 3 hours and 34 minutes, I could perhaps get a 90-minute film, using only the good stuff. And there is good stuff to mine in the movie, otherwise, I would not have even attempted this. The costumes, sets, fight choreography, and vfx hold up well today and deserve a better end product. My vision for this was clear from the start, which made creating it easier. This would be only about Alexander’s conquest of Asia. Everything else would be eliminated. If a scene wasn’t about war or his expedition then it was gone. I was worried about having enough for a feature but it ended up coming in at a tight 91 minutes.
Besides the focus on love triangles (including an incest storyline with his mother), Stone made many, many more strange decisions in this movie. Some of these include:
Casting: it is one of the worst cast movies ever made. Colin Farrell foremost did not have the acting chops to play the most charismatic person in history. I cut down on his performance as much as I could. Because of her terrible performance and the fact that she was miscast as Alexander’s mother, Angelina Jolie has been removed except for a few shots. Likewise, Rosario Dawson gives a career-worst performance and has also been cut save for a few shots. I tried to protect other actors like Val Kilmer and Jared Leto by removing the worst parts of their performances.
Voiceover: Roger Ebert said in his review that he liked the battle scenes in the movie only because they spared him from Anthony Hopkins' oppressive and constant narration. Hopkins and his voiceover have been eliminated. I do not think that a voiceover was necessary. Time and place are told to the viewer with on-screen titles now.
Score: Vangelis is one of my favorite composers and musicians. I enjoy listening to his score for Alexander on its own. However, it does not work for this movie. Vangelis was hired to score the film before there was even a finished script. So he had no idea what he was getting into. In Greece, Alexander the Great is a national hero, and his music reflects that. Little did he know about…
Cynicism: Stone’s film is dark, cynical, and negative. Vangelis’ score is uplifting, victorious, and a celebration. Put the two together and you have a strange juxtaposition that confuses the viewer. The only pure characters in the film are Alexander’s best friend and lover Hephaestion and his friend and general Ptolemy. Everyone else is a vile, selfish, traitor, rapist, or murderer. Alexander’s father Philip II is especially evil and sadistic as is his mother. Alexander himself is unlikeable, weak, violent, and disloyal. Warrior King is a much more flattering take. Cynicism has been cut as much as possible. Vangelis' score has been entirely removed and replaced with his superior score from another movie that nobody saw 1492: Conquest of Paradise. I ended up using every single track from the CD so it seems like it’s the score to Alexander now.
Editing: This is what prompted me to do this project. It was a way to test my skills by re-editing the Battle of Guagamela scene. It was one of the worst examples of editing of all time. It was so bad that Stone had to put on-screen titles during the battle to tell the viewers where they were. “Macedonian Left” as an example. I thought that there had to be a way to fix it so that no text was necessary and the battle would play out exactly the way Alexander described it in the council of war scene. If you end up watching just one scene from this fan edit, make it this battle, the showpiece of the movie. All music has been removed for a more immersive experience. Shots have been combined so that we are not constantly cutting from different places in the battle. It flows naturally as Alexander starts with his cavalry feint drawing out the Persians so his infantry can then attack the center. Some shots are flipped so that the Persians are always seen to be attacking from the right and the Greeks from the left side of the screen. Many shots in my cut are sped up, slowed down, flipped, or reversed. I did whatever I had to do to make this a movie someone might actually like to watch. To me, the original is so bad that only an MST3K overdub could make it enjoyable. Like the other two fan edits, this version is told in chronological order.
I was ruthless with this edit. Anything that was even remotely cheesy or cringy I cut. This means that for every scene I didn’t cut I re-edited. The total number of splices I made is 475. This presented a difficult challenge when it came to the soundtrack. Fixing all of those audio jumpcuts for a 90-minute film across 6 channels was extremely time-consuming. I used every editing trick I could to make it smooth. One of the things that made this edit possible is that the music is primarily in the front left and right tracks. Without this, I could not have done the edit. That said, there is so much music in the movie that it often bleeds into the center dialogue track and the rear tracks. I used every tool I could including some AI separation apps to get rid of it. The narration and music removal meant that in addition to new music I had to insert hundreds of sound effects to fill in the empty gaps. The rough cut of this was tremendously fun to work on, but fixing the 5.1 mix was a time-consuming chore.
Extra footage: The opening and closing credits of the movie are a cheesy After Effects comp so I made my own custom ones. I am a CG artist and compositor so those were fun to do. I also added shots where needed from a variety of sources. To show the passage of time between scenes I added location shots from 4K sources. To add to the Babylon sequence I took two shots from Marvel’s Eternals (which were obviously based on Alexander). All new footage was color-corrected to match. Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut blu-ray is not as crisp or as well color-corrected as the theatrical release. So I decided to AI upscale and enhance the entire cut to 4K and then color-correct it to look more like the theatrical cut. This will be the only 4K version of Alexander available.
There were some things that I simply could not fix. Those would be things like Colin Farrell’s ridiculous blond wig, the fact that Stone had all of his Macedonian actors use Irish accents to match Colin Farrell, and the fact that Colin Farrell is just not a good actor. I tried to darken Farrell’s hair but found it to be impossible. In the future AI tools will be able to fix bad accents and more but we aren’t quite there yet. This is the best version of the movie I could produce. I wanted it to be more like Stone’s 5-star classic Platoon. It’s very much a “guy movie.” Only one female character has any lines and that would be Annelise Hesme as Princess Strateira. I kept this scene because it showed Alexander’s compassion for the vanquished.
There are too many changes to list here, but like I said, anything that doesn’t have to do with war or conquest was cut. The film has multiple dancing sequences that were cut. There is so much dancing that there was a documentary made at the time just about them. The fan edit took about one year to do although I did not work on it every day. I am currently working on some supplemental material. I am happy with the result. This is a version I can watch to imagine what it may have been like to follow Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago and that is what I set out to accomplish. I will be submitting it soon to the fanedit.org team for inclusion in the database. This post is just a first step in the process.
So come back here for updates and In the meantime please enjoy the poster and teaser trailer!
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