I kind of enjoyed the program. Michael Wood seems like a genuinely nice guy who is enthusiastic about his retracing of Alexander the Great's march from the northern border of Greece to India. He sits on a mule, hikes through chest-high breakers around rocky outcroppings, travels with his crew through desert wastelands. He meets people who dress oddly and speak languages you never heard of. They sit around the fire, smoke, and sing songs of Alexander the Great, whose legend seems to have lived on.
I expect that if you asked most people about Alexander's ethnic background they'd say "Greek." But, as this documentary mentions, he wasn't Greek at all. Like his father he was a northern barbarian. When I was in Macedonia I was surprised to find that it didn't even LOOK much like Greece. It seemed to be far more mountainous, cooler, and heavily forested.
Wood does his best to evoke Alexander's character but, after all, the guy lived more than 2,000 years ago and the data base is limited. So we don't really learn that much about Alexander. The diarists on his march recorded more in the way of movement and obstacles than impressions of manners or quotidian facts.
The host is more interested in the remnants of legend than in ethnography. Those old guys around the fire sing about someone names Alexander (it comes out as "Xander") but we don't know what language they're speaking, how many wives they have, or what they ate for breakfast.
Wood's interest in features of the terrain are about the same as those of any tourist. Gee, this is an impressive desert. Or, Wow, it gets cold here at night, even in summer. I don't mean to suggest that it's an aimless travelogue. It has a purpose -- retracing Alexander's route from Greece to India. That's more than can be said in the episode dealing with "Shangri-La." Shangri-La wasn't a legend until a British novelist invented it in the 1930s. Shangri-La, still a fascinating look at an utterly remote landscape, was ALL travelogue.
If it's permitted, I'd like to recommend a feature film that deals with Alexander the Great's legacy around the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. It's "The Man Who Would Be King," from the Kipling story, directed by John Huston and starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Awfully entertaining.
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