Forget "The Alamo"

Rating: 5/10 (3 April 2005)

In the early part of the Nineteenth Century, the area now known as the state of Texas was the scene of a massive tug-of-war between the Mexicans, who claimed ownership of the land, and the Americans who were determined to gain independence for the territory so that it could one day be subsumed into the new, ever expanding nation to the north. The 1836 siege of the Alamo played a crucial role in determining the outcome of that struggle. For it was here that a group of 187 Texans chose to make their stand against over 3,000 Mexican troops led by the famed Santa Anna - and lost their lives in the process. This turned out to be a short-lived, Pyrrhic victory for the Mexicans, however, for the totality and brutality of the slaughter so outraged the Texans that the phrase "Remember the Alamo!" quickly became the official rallying cry for Texas independence, which was won soon after.
"The Alamo"'s all-star cast includes Patrick Wilson as William Travis, the Lieutenant Colonel who led the American forces; Jason Patric as James Bowie, the consumptive knife-fighter and leader of the Texas militia; Billy Bob Thornton as Davey Crocket, the legendary Indian-fighter-turned-United-States-senator; and Dennis Quaid as General Sam Houston, who chose to sit out the siege but who managed to extract swift and total revenge against Santa Anna and the Mexican army a very short time later.
The film is most effective when it deals with the history surrounding the event, even though a number of historians have raised serious objections as to the veracity of much of what is shown on screen. Still, when virtually every single person is dead at the end of a battle, it is a little difficult to come up with the primary source, eyewitness testimony one would need to compile a reliable historical account of the incident. Speculation is obviously going to play a very large part in any dramatic recreation of the event, so I think the moviemakers can be given some slack in this area. However, it is as dramas that such movies are judged, and here "The Alamo" doesn't score nearly so well. Admirably, it has attempted to see its larger-than-life characters in relatively life-sized terms, but in its attempt at humanizing the participants, it often winds up sentimentalizing them instead. Crockett, in particular, falls victim to this problem. So obsessed is he with playing down the near-mythological, iconic status his previous exploits have garnered for him, that he becomes little more than a simpering revisionist bore in the process.
"The Alamo" also suffers from a malady common to films based on well known historical events: that of knowing the end of the story going into the movie. It leads to an even more serious problem here than it did in, say, "Titanic," because, at least in that film, even though we knew beforehand that the ship was going to sink, at least we didn't know exactly which characters were going to go to their watery graves with her. In the case of "The Alamo," all we can do is wait for the final battle to commence and watch as each of the characters suffers a common fate.
Because the majority of the film's 137-minute running time is taken up with the 13-day-long siege and standoff, the pacing often leans towards the desultory and the languid. Most of the time is spent with the characters sitting around and waiting for help to arrive, not exactly a scenario designed to provide edge-of-the-seat excitement for the viewer. Most of the acting is wooden and stiff, although Thornton brings a few nice touches to his portrayal of Crockett, even if his golly-gee-aren't-I-just-like-everyone-else boyishness begins to wear a mite thin after awhile. There's also an undercurrent of xenophobia running through the film in its one-sided portrayal of the opposing forces. Santa Anna, in particular, is reduced to the level of a stock villain, stopping just short of twirling his (admittedly nonexistent) moustache at moments of extreme dastardliness. Needless to say, there's been very little attempt to humanize him.
The actual climactic assault on the Alamo has been impressively mounted, although we are strangely unmoved by all the deaths we see happening before us. Interestingly, it is only in a different scene - the one in which Houston's army chases some fleeing Mexican soldiers into a river, brutally and senselessly slaughtering them in the process - that the filmmakers capture the ugliness and madness of war. More scenes like that might have made "The Alamo" less of a total rout for the audience than the Alamo was for those involved in the real thing.