Oliver Stone's epic "Alexander" is flawed. Despite several sequences of awesome visual imagination and excitement, Stone still needs Anthony Hopkins to explain everything about the legendary warrior king of the ancient world.

Hopkins plays Ptolemy, who fought alongside Alexander the Great as a young man. As the film opens, he's an aged fellow in Egypt, dictating a memoir about Alexander. He explains the lad's roots, his motives for conquest, and his other considerable achievements, while pointing at maps and ancient illustrations.

We are then shown flashback scenes from Alexander's life — the young Macedonian prince being taught by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer), his love-hate relationships with his complex and often-warring parents, the roughhew King Philip (Val Kilmer) and the seductive and manipulative Olympias (Angelina Jolie), Alexander's rise to the throne (now played as a young adult by Colin Farrell), a few key battles on his seven-year march through Persia and points further east, his bisexual love affairs, his marriage to the exotic Roxane (Rosario Dawson) and more, spread out over nearly three hours of running time.

However, instead of flowing one into the other, the scenes from Alexander's extraordinary 33 years of life too often come at the filmgoer like turned pages from Ptolemy's book. They're more like tableaus than parts of a cohesive narrative.

Angelina Jolie plays the title character's mother in "Alexander." She advises her son to seize the throne before his father kills him.

Stone and his co-writers seem challenged to explain Alexander's motivations for his seven-year eastward odyssey of bloody warfare; pointing to a variety of factors from an aggressively determined mother who wanted her son to be a god to a gruff father who wanted him to be a man to a philosophical teacher who wanted him to civilize the world. In a way, he achieves all three wishes (though his attempts to civilize are sometimes mighty uncivilized.)

Farrell makes a valiant effort as Alexander, but it's a little hard to get over the dark actor's blond hair. Much more disturbing is the film's lackadaisical approach to accents. Stone called in all sorts of ancient authorities to make sure clothing and customs and warfare are all historically accurate. Then he lets each actor speak with whatever accent he or she chooses. It makes no sense.

Farrell, who can do a fine flat English accent, speaks in his native Irish brogue; Jolie assumes some sort of Germanic accent; an unknown actor emerges from the soldiers to make a key speech in a Scottish tone.

Granted, we don't expect them to speak an ancient tongue (unless they're in a Mel Gibson movie), but the English should all be consistent to suggest a unified culture. (For the sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s, for example, Hollywood made it an unwritten rule for Romans to speak British English, while other ancient cultures spoke a flatter American English.)

Here, it's a bizarre polyglot of distracting dialects. It sure makes it hard to suspend disbelief.

"Alexander" reportedly cost $150 million to make — and it's all on the screen in spectacular set pieces, particularly the lush and lavish hanging gardens of Babylon. The spectacle of "Alexander" is undeniable. But so are the film's failings.