Oliver Stone takes responsibility for the theatrical release, but it was influenced by people who wanted the audience's hands held and the sex scenes played up for commercial reasons. They even changed the time jumps to, for example, "3 years later", because the theatrical audience wouldn't understand that 327 BC was later than 330 BC. The Director's Cut is a reworking of the entire movie to Stone's artistic vision unencumbered by those commercial considerations. He can't take the eyeliner off Haphaistion, but his death scene is completly reworked and the knife sequence with Roxanne is thankfully gone, although, that takes out the copy of Homer's Illiad that Alexander always kept with him. A small price to pay I would say.

The story he tells in this version is compelling, and I didn't have any moments of "Oh no! What an artistic blunder." like I did with the theatrical release. All the flashback scenes work for me and are distributed over all three acts, and have relavence to the scene from which they cut away. I think he knew he was going to make a director's cut all along, and didn't put much effort into editing the theatrical release in which the classroom type narration is at odds with what Stone was trying to do. Even the big jump cut to Guagamela works better because of the scene preceeding it. There is a lot skipped in that 6 year jump, but Stones says he had to move the story ahead so he could cover the final 8 years.

I would say that anyone who buys the theatrical release DVD just because it's 11 minutes longer is missing out. BTW, the film score by Vangelis is outstanding.