And Alexander Wept (2020)

He seems pretty down on Hollywood script-writers but there's a scene in the 2nd season of Westworld where the Man in Black is at a party and corrects someone who uses the Gruber mis-quotatation.

"That's a corruption. Plutarch didn't write that. He said 'When Alexander was told there was an infinity of worlds...he wept...for he had not yet become the lord of even one.'"

> Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie.

I'm not sure one should advertise their poor taste in movies. As action flicks go, Die Hard is one of the best, if not the best.

> Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.”

This is incorrect. Hans doesn't refer to one of his own victories; he contemplates with irony a model of a future project of the Nakatomi Corporation, and comments the extent of their conquests.

The point of this is to make us understand Nakatomi is a formidable company, and that Hans, who's attacking them, is even more formidable.

The exact quote from the movie is also not that; it is "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer".

(I do find it interesting though, that the origin of the quote is in fact Alexander before conquering anything and wondering why, since there are so many worlds available to him, he has not yet mastered any.)

Does anyone see/hear this quote without thinking of Jack Donaghy using it in 30 Rock -- where he specifically cites "Hans Gruber, Die Hard" as the source?

I always think of the Oliver Stone “Alexander” scene where he finally hits the Hindu Kush mountains and cries because he knows if he won’t find the “end of the world”. He quotes Aristotle “you’ll look west and see Macedonia, you’ll look east and see the eastern sea”, and, seeing the Himalayas, instead he realizes the world is much much bigger than Aristotle assumed.

If you look at a historical map where it’s thought Alexander stopped, he would have known there -were- more worlds to conquer, but it was nature, not foreign kingdoms, that stopped him.

It was fun to read but man are some people snooty. To wit: "The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. (And let me tell ya something: the people who write the scripts for action movies are literally forbidden to invent anything. Their mandate is to regift whatever is known to have worked in the past." Come on, Die Hard was great.