As we wrote in 2010, when first attempting a retrospective of the directorial features of Oliver Stone, the outspoken director loves his country, but he is also among its loudest critics. This makes him either the perfect filmmaker to take on a non-documentary portrait of the world’s most famous whistleblower, as he does in this week’s “Snowden” (our review) or the absolute worst, depending on your point of view on Snowden, patriotism, the act of whistleblowing, the CIA, the United States of America, and of course, Stone himself.
READ MORE: Review: Oliver Stone’s Hard-Boiled Crime Saga ‘Savages’ A Muddled & Messy Disappointment
Simply put, the one thing you cannot expect from Stone is neutrality: Whether tackling history head-on in films like “Platoon” or “Born On The Fourth Of July,” or profiling presidents in “JFK,” “W.” and “Nixon,” and even in seemingly genre-centered material like “Natural Born Killers” or “Any Given Sunday,” Stone unapologetically views America in his own unique, and sometimes contradictory, way. So, does “Snowden” represent a confrontational clash between the political ideologies of its subject and its director, or a complementary melding of those points of view? Is it hagiography or critique? And what truth can be found in a fictionalized profile of an already divisive figure if it comes through such a defiantly non-objective lens? These questions are worth bearing in mind in our assessment of the rest of Stone’s output.
His track record is certainly marked by tremendous highs, inarguable lows and the curious middle ground largely populated with unprepossessing genre excursions like “U-Turn,” “Any Given Sunday” and “The Doors.” Yet while his output might be uneven, his films are hardly ever boring, and whether his experiments work or not, he usually doesn’t refrain from playing with form, via unusual lens switches, film stocks, shooting techniques and camera angles cropping up in the most unexpected of places. Detractors maintain that such flash and dazzle can make even his best work feel dated; defenders hold it up as evidence of a distinctive, uncompromisingly auteurist vision.
But most of us lie somewhere in between those two points of view, so to help you make up your mind about whether to bother with his latest biopic this weekend, we’re taking a proper, updated look back through Stone’s feature directorial output. Excluding documentaries like “South Of The Border” and the bombastically titled “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States” and those films he only wrote the screenplay for, like “Scarface,” here’s our ranking of every Oliver Stone movie prior to “Snowden.”
19. “Alexander” (2004)
Hoo boy, where to begin? The most ambitious film Stone has ever tackled, “Alexander” is an almost magnificent failure on every level, rendered watchable only for its camp qualities. There is skill on intermittent display —for one thing, the battle scenes are grandiose and gorgeously lensed— but the cast… sweet Lord, the cast! The director often lets his actors play fast and loose, but never has he indulged the worst impulses of subpar performances as he does here. Then again, the characters are thinly sketched and mounted with absurd exaggeration —from Angelina Jolie’s snake-handling, potentially incestuous Queen Olympias to Val Kilmer’s groggy over-eater King Philip to Jared Leto’s painfully misguided eye-shadow addict Hephaistion. A bottle blonde Colin Farrell as the titular military genius demands his own sentence-long description: you can see he’s trying really, cringingly hard (he was at the height of his alcohol and drug addiction), but the larger-than-life Alexander is just too much for him, and he feels tiny and diminished within his character’s colossal penumbra. Loaded with giggle-inducing lovers’ talk between Alexander and Hephaistion and cardboard villain scheming from Olympias, overall this is more or less the definition of hubristic filmmaking brought low by its own pomposity.
18. “Seizure” (1974)
If it’s not exactly been disowned by Stone, his directorial debut has never been a title he’s actively promoted either, and it’s not hard to see why. A deeply schlocky horror within which, with the best will in the world, it’s difficult to see even the nascent seeds of Stone’s filmmaking future, it features defanged “Dark Shadows” star Jonathan Frid as Edmund Blackstone, a writer whose nightmares come to life and begin to off his Agatha Christie-style cast of houseguests (all eccentric millionaires and cheating trophy wives). The three demons Blackstone’s imagination summons (like many neophyte writer/directors, Stone here is enthralled by the idea of the dangerous power of writerly creativity) are Henry Judd Baker as the Jackal, Hervé Villechaize (Nick Nack from “The Man with the Golden Gun” and Tattoo in “Fantasy Island“) as The Spider and Martine Beswick (another Bond star with small parts in both “From Russia with Love” —as one of the fighting gypsies— and “Thunderball“) as the sexy Queen of Evil. There’s not a whole lot to recommend it now except for lovers of kitsch, and while it would take seven years for Stone to be given another shot at directing, it’s sort of impressive that it happened at all, given the clunky amateurishness of this endeavor.
17. “World Trade Center” (2006)
Considering Stone’s reputation as a political firebrand, high was the anticipation and also the trepidation for his take on the then-still-recent events of 9/11. But following hot on the heels of Paul Greengrass‘ terrific “United 93,” the biggest surprise was how conventional a melodrama Stone’s film proved to be. He clearly needed to play nice after the tanking of “Alexander,” but no one was expecting anything close to the Lifetime movie-of-the-week that “World Trade Center” turned out to be. It’s not without its moments: the attack itself is well staged, and few directors are as adept at gruff male bonding, which makes up much of the second half of the film. But it still comes across as a somewhat dishonest piece of work, taking a tragic day and mining a happy ending from it. And the political subtexts are a little disturbing (Michael Shannon‘s character, who later served in Iraq, declaring that “they’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this”), the filmmaking unsubtle —witness the soft focus flashbacks from Nicolas Cage‘s character— and Stone’s total inability to depict women as three dimensional individuals is glaring in the short shrift given to Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as stricken spouses.
16. “The Hand” (1981)
Really only comparable to Stone’s debut within his catalogue (and it does represent a significant improvement on “Seizure”), the supremely cheesy “The Hand” is probably most notable now for the always good value Michael Caine provides in one of his most obviously beach house/tax return-inspired roles: he plays a comic book illustrator pursued (even cross-country!) by his own severed hand which he loses in a freak accident. Stone’s filmmaking craft may have improved a great deal since “Seizure,” but it’s sadly put to work sustaining a ridiculous premise that even sees frequent use of perspective camerawork —from the perspective of a crawling malevolent severed hand! The unconvincing prosthetic is devoid of anything but the rubberiest terror, and though there are a lot of “it was only the cat”-style efforts at jump-scares, few of them really land. The film is also deeply misogynistic, seeing as, however reluctantly, we’re supposed to relate to the maimed man’s deep, inchoate anger (which often feels like the filmmaker’s own) at his neglected and dissatisfied wife (Andrea Marcovicco), and at a world that doesn’t appreciate him as he believes he deserves. Still, Caine’s commitment, especially at the climax as he “Strangelove’s” himself, is a sight to behold.