This movie purports to be based on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, a great piece of literature. The makers of this movie must have figured that "based on" meant it would be a good idea to depart from the novel at almost every point it they got it into their heads to do so, with or without (and in their case without) any good reason. In every case it is for the worse, and the final result is a travestry. If you want to see how it should have been done, just watch Peter Hall's black and white version. With a version like that around anyone has to be either very good or very stupid to attempt compete. I leave it to the reader to guess to which category the makers of this movie belong.

I ordered this dvd because it was cheap and I needed to add a couple dollars to another order to get free shipping. I thought, why not? I'm glad I did. The premise sounded interesting, but I have seen other movies attempt similar premises and make a hash of it. Not this one. It held together the two genres of science fiction fantasy and historical action and didn't stumble with the ball once. It made the story believable and in the process added an interesting twist to the old Beowulf tale. I recommend this movie.

I can't agreee with the reviewer who complained about the video quality. It is a TV production from the sixties, but the video quality is excellent for all that. And the acting is superb. Christopher Plummer is one of the great Shakepearean actors of our time and we are priveleged to see him here at the beginning of his illustrious career. We also see another Canadian actor at the beginning of his career: Donald Sutherland playing Fortinbras. I believe it was his very first role. And Michael Caine playing Horatio, and of course, Robert Shaw as Claudius. Could you ask for more?

There are good guys and there are bad guys. And there are children. The bad guys are very bad. There is a lot of shooting and swearing and a lot of people get hurt. The good guy wins and hugs child. You've probably seen all this before. Give yourself a break.

As an action thriller, the movie isn't bad. As an attempt to explore the concept of entering other people's dreams and answering that age old question of the relationship between dreams and reality, I think it is a failure. No one dreams like this. Many movies have portrayed dreams in a very effective way. I am thinking of "The Science of Dreams," for example. This one cannot resist the opportunity of showing off Hollywood's special effects prowess, and this destroys any believability. And guns and explosions and car crashes and everything. Does anyone really dream like that? Considering Christopher Nolan's previous movies, I expected better.

This is a great movie, but there is no French audio and the dubbing is terrible, especially the actor who dubbed Depardieu, a man with a wonderful voice. Spend the extra movie and buy the Fox Lorber version in the origninal French. I'd give that a 5 star rating. Wonderful biographical movie of Balzac. The French are good at these sorts of things. The acting is first rate.

As historical fiction, this is pure comic book writing. The author has taken liberties with the facts to create a version of history that is one dimensional and trite. The bookish Brutus and unathletic Octavian both end up rippling with manly virility, duking it out in mortal combat. Huh? No one familiar with the real story can really be satisfied seeing things so hashed up. Never mind it is historically inaccurate and that neither of them were there in Egypt (Octavian was still a boy, for Pete's sake) it is not true to either of their characters, what character they have left after the author has reinvented them to fit his genre of writing. Other inaccuracies abound. For example, what's Julia still doing around after she died (her death was a factor in the final break between Caesar and Pompey)? The author glosses over these glaring inaccuracies in his historical note at the end, focusing instead on less glaring "literary licenses," implying thereby that he is actually writing historical fiction. If he is capable of writing an historical note at the end then he knows he is not really writing historical fiction and that there are far worse inaccuracies in his book than the ones he mentions. Despite all this he kept me reading, which means it was an entertaining read. Too bad it ultimately fails to satisfy on other grounds.

One of the self-justifications advanced for this book is that we need to correct what the author perceives as a Western bias to portray Alexander in "heroic, even superhuman proportions." Claiming that bitterness and resentment" against Alexander remains to this day in the Middle East (he claims that in Eastern cultures Alexander is known as the "accursed one," the "two-horned Satan," "a Hellenic version of Genghis Khan"), Prevas sets out to correct this Western bias.

Why replacing one cultural bias with another is desirable, he does not say. Nor does he really do justice to the complex picture of Alexander in Eastern cultures. He neglects to mention, for example, that Alexander figures (in a positive light) in the Qur'an (Muslim scholars generally identify the Dhul-Qarnayn of the Qur'an with Alexander the Great) and that the Alexander Romance (an obviously positive portrait of Alexander) has found its way to an honored place in Persian literature.

Furthermore, Prevas's own bias (and it is a bias) against Alexander is firmly rooted in Western tradition. Not surprisingly, of all the "primary" sources he relies on, he quotes most heavily from Quintus Curtius, a Roman historian writing four hundred years after the events he was describing and who had his own axes to grind. Curtius tended to model his portrait of Alexander on tyrants familiar to himself, especially Tiberius and Caligula. He also relied heavily on the now lost history of Cleitarchus, an contemporary of Alexander who wrote an unflattering history emphasizing the negative aspects of Alexander's character and seeing Alexander's story as one of a man corrupted by his own success, degenerating into an alcoholic, a megalomanic, a tyrant, and a murderer. Prevas looses no opportunity to harp on this theme. That, in itself, is not the problem. It's the uncritical way the evidence is presented that undermines Prevas' credibility as an historian.

Mostly Prevas satisfies himself with just telling the story, as if the facts will speak for themselves. The story is certainly a compelling one, to be sure, and not least because, the way Prevas tells it, it is a simple one. The problem with this rather uncritical approach to history, of course, is that facts seldom speak for themselves, especially facts that are twenty-three centuries old. Although many of the facts Prevas uses are not in dispute, most of the colourful details, particularly the fine speeches, all of which find their way into Prevas' account without any explanation or commentary, are clearly fictitious embellishments intended to present certain interpretations of events. What, for example, are we to make of the fine speech of the page, Hermolaus, which Prevas presents as fact? It is almost certainly a complete fabrication inserted for rhetorical purposes.

Moreover, although many of the facts are not in dispute, the way the are selected and presented certainly can be disputed, and Prevas' interpretation of them needs to be argued, not simply taken for granted. For example, Prevas, like Curtius, uncritically accepts the notion that Alexander's desire to be treated like a Persian king was evidence of his megalomania and arrogance, preferring this simplistic, psychological explanation to the explanation, accepted by most modern scholars, that Alexander's motive was political and based on the practical demands Alexander faced in being accepted as king by his Persian subjects.

In the end, just as Curtius's Alexander may tell us more about Curtius (and Curtius' attitude to Roman tyrants such as Tiberius and Caligula) Prevas' Alexander tells us more about Prevas, and about Prevas' take on the present day conflict in the Middle East) than about Alexander. Prevas admits as much in his acknowledgements, where he recognizes that his "perspective on the conflict between the Muslim world and the West" helped him in writing this book. My own feeling, however, is that this is his greatest flaw. Revising history to suit present day agendas is a shortsighted enterprise.

I bought this dvd to replace an old VHS recording I made from TV 15 years ago and later transfered to DVD. I will stick with the VHS recording. There is no excuse for such bad a DVD release if I have a better recording from TV 15 years ago!

I read Thucydides as an undergraduate, and had some knowledge of ancient Greece, and came to this book hoping to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge, thinking it was aimed at a general reader. If it is, it does a terrible job. It assumes the reader already has a fairly advanced knowledge and doesn't bother clarifying this for the general reader. An example is Chapter 7 when he speaks of "an appalling outbreak of stasis," using a Greek term he does not explain. In English "stasis" means state of inactivity or equilibrium. Why "appalling"? I happen to have a Greek lexicon and the Greek term has the meaning of "faction." How many general readers can dust off their Greek lexicon to clarify that confusing detail, without which the whole following discussion will leave the general reader scratching their heads. As well, Hornblower has the specialists penchant for going off on scholarly tangents that may be important for the specialist but merely frustrate the general reader. For example, the chapter on the run up to the war does very little to inform the general reader about the events leading up to the war, which is what I was primarily interested in reading about. Instead we get an in-depth analysis of the reliability of Thucydides and what he did and did not say. Important, maybe... but when the chapter concludes by saying "We have seen in this chapter that Corinthian unease at Athenian e3xpansion... was important in bringing about the Pelopnnesian war, I am left wondering. Somehow I didn't get that at all, the point being entirely sidelined by other issues. In general I got the feeling that I could not see the forest for the trees, that is, that Hornblower's concern for scholarly detail distracted him from the real story. There is, in fact, a complete lack of any narrative sense. We hop from place to place, from Italy, to Egypt, to Persia, to ARgos, to Corinth, to Sparta, to Athens, looking at each in detail. But there is little sense of the big picture. All in all, a disappointing book despite its obvious scholarly merits.