A total distortion of history

Rating: 1/10 (21 February 2010)

When will a movie about what The Alamo was really all about be made? It is now the twenty-first century and yet here we have, once again, a movie that essentially celebrates a republic -- Texas -- founded on slavery. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, an important fact totally omitted from this film. White Texans were rebelling against their government in Mexico in no small part because they wanted to preserve slavery. They were, in effect, terrorists fighting against their own government in Mexico City that wanted slavery abolished. The Texan victory over Mexico in 1836 assured that slavery would continue. If Mexico had prevailed at the Battle of San Jacinto, which followed the Texan defeat at The Alamo, slavery would have ended in Texas in 1836 instead of thirty years later. The movie adds at the end that Texas was admitted as the 28th state into the Union in 1845, but omits that it was admitted as a slave state. Is that fact unimportant or irrelevant? So here we have once again a film that distorts history and overturns elemental morality by arguing that those who were, in effect, fighting for slavery were really fighting for freedom. And by the way, it was not only Jim Bowie who owned slaves, as the movie briefly acknowledges, but also Sam Houston and Davy Crockett as well. How heroic is that? I guess we will have to wait for an African American writer and director to finally get this story right.