There are far too many windy speeches to make Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” a great film. It wants fewer bitter denunciations and more bloodpacks. Certainly it has plenty of eyeliner, though the camp is kept to a minimum. Where Stone succeeds is in the film’s impressive capaciousness. Lovingly crafted, almost every frame is a baroque tableau with smaller stories popping from the corners. Babylon and Alexandria are breathtaking, while Asia is as huge and foreboding as it must have seemed to the Greeks. The fights work, too. Stone lays out the chaotic battle with Darius as cleanly as a chess match. The climactic skirmishes in India evoke the oppressive disorientation Alexander and his men must have felt.

Breaking away from his usual cinematic tics, Stone took a page from Peter Jackson, trusting in spectacle, his authorial presence appearing in the form of massive sets, myriad costumes, and seas of extras. Unfortunately too many of Stone’s spectacles were created with breadth and not depth, coverage but not coherence. Although it’s not surprising that the story is episodic—Alexander’s history comes to us only in fragments and legends—Stone’s fidelity to what he takes as boilerplate history results in a spongy narrative that soaks everything into formlessness. After awhile it becomes difficult to keep the plots against the throne straight. Philip’s consipirators begin to look a lot like Alexander’s. Some of them are, but Stone doesn’t clarify matters by jumping back and forth in time. Alexander’s empire is carefully plotted, but soon the villages and citadels blur into a wearying sameness. And, distracting for an historical epic, there’s too much emphasis on Alexander’s place in history, not least by Alexander himself. Because of Ptolemy’s framing voiceover, the film already seems delivered to us in the shrinkwrap of posterity.

Some good performances help. Colin Farrel is so wrong for the part of a warrior prince that he’s just right. The oddness of his boyish face and platinum hair somehow make for compelling viewing, as if Eminem had stumbled upon a time machine and, in the shape of unwashed barbarian hordes to slaughter, finally found an outlet for his rage. Farrel has enough smarts to portray this most philosophic of kings, but he can deliver on the action, too. His final battle is played with snarling ferocity, although he’s most at home showing off the James Bond sangfroid of his cage match—“love scene” as some will call it—with a feral Rosario Dawson. The Jolie-bot hisses and slinks its way to an almost human performance as his conniving mother. And Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy strikes the rueful note of a man shaken by contact with a divinity; Stone must have been itching to write in some allusions to the New Testament.