Alexander|Fort St Elmo, Valletta — a Maltese star fort standing in for Alexandria

Alexandria was never filmed in Egypt. The city Alexander founds and is finally buried in was assembled out of Malta's Grand Harbour, shot before principal photography began and extended upward with digital architecture. Fort St Elmo carried the weight of it — the low, sharp-cornered star fort that sits on the very tip of the Valletta peninsula, water on two sides, catching the light off both harbours at once.

The fort earned its face the hard way. It was already standing when the Ottoman fleet arrived in 1565, and it held the entrance to the harbour for a month while the rest of the island prepared. Almost none of its garrison survived. The Knights rebuilt and thickened it afterwards, the British added to it again, and the result is a place with four centuries of defensive engineering layered into one footprint. Stone's crew needed stone that had genuinely been battered by the Mediterranean. Here it was, for the price of a permit.

You go in through the main gate at Misraħ Sant' Iermu, at the far end of Republic Street where the tourists thin out. Fort St Elmo now holds the National War Museum, which runs from Bronze Age material through the George Cross and the siege convoys of 1942, and the ticket gets you onto the ramparts. From the seaward parapet the whole Grand Harbour opens to the right, breakwater in front, Fort Ricasoli across the water.

Look out from there and you can see the film's arithmetic exactly: real bastions along the bottom of the frame, invented Alexandria added above the skyline.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.