Good thing to watch, once you've made it past the first 30 or so minutes of it.

Rating: 7/10 (21 October 2004)

One more movie about the Alamo martyrs. A solid, traditional, Hollywood war movie, with all of the usual attributes like heroic monologues backgrounded by an orchestra brass section on the soundtrack that's crawling closer with every fatalistic word, a good good guy and a bad good guy that reveals his "goodness" as the movie unfolds, slow motion dramatic moments, lots of dust and lots of uniformed people running at the camera. In general - as always - a group recall of personal life stories against the battle background. I guess there's no other way of telling a war story in cinema.
The subdivision "good guys / bad guys" is, well, startling: the good guys are mostly heroes and men of honor, while the bad guys are generally miserable, disgusting and look like walking displays of mortal sins. It makes the rare moments when the bad guys are beaten rather satisfying, but it also (IMHO) decreases the realism a good deal: in real life the bad guys are far less repelling, you even never know whether you end up as one of them (or maybe you already have?). I guess it's about dramatizing the story or something like that. There's surely a name for it, I just don't know it yet.
Speaking of realism: despite the really big scale of the battle (won't say "huge" cause even the "Brave Heart" is huger than this), there's practically no blood in the movie, so I figure that the complete realism wasn't the point, or at least wasn't the emphasis of the story.
In any case, all war movies are similar (see above), so what really makes the difference are the details. And the special mention goes to Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett! Billy Bob is amazing here, I don't care much about what he says or what he does (that's all in the script) but it's all about how he says or does it. He manages to create an absolutely lovable character, and fairly believable as well. Excellent work. The young Patrick Wilson is also pretty good as William Travis, for some reason he reminds me of a young Kevin Costner.
Another interesting thing to mention is the specially rigged camera that makes quite a few curious shots. But the potentially impressive shot with the cannonball flying over the fort's wall is just too slow for my taste, they could've made it more dynamic. Anyway, in the LOTR-3 a similar shot was done much, much better.
The pace of the movie is slow at the beginning, probably too slow, and aggravated by this terrible piano that appears here and there in the soundtrack and makes the whole thing not only slow but moody and boring (this is subjective, of course). However, after about 30 minutes of making you want to kill the pianist, the movie starts uphill and gets interesting.
To summarize: it's a war movie with the standard set of corresponding character types and scenes, with a good deal of touching, romantic moments (the word "romantic" doesn't necessarily mean "related to a romance"), and is a good thing to watch, once you've made it past the first 30 or so minutes of it. Strong playacting and some interesting shots make it even more appealing. I'd give it solid 7 out of 10, basically, for the playacting.