An Odd And Flawed Attempt To Impose A Politically Correct Interpretation On A Quintessentially Politically Incorrect Moment In American History
by David Rogers

The Alamo is an odd little movie. Which is a surprising thing to say about a movie that was supposed to be a blockbuster film about a defining moment in American history.

The problem with The Alamo is that it tries to turn a fundamentally politically incorrect moment in history into a politically correct story.

It can’t be done. And moviegoers respond to this fundamental cognitive dissonance at the center of the film by staying away in droves. John Hancock’s $75 million Disney opportunity turned into the biggest disaster in the history of Imagine Films (and that includes Willow).

The movie begins at the end of the Alamo—after the last of the Thirteen Days to Glory, after the death of Jim Bowie, Col. William Barrett Travis and Davy Crockett. The screen opens with Mexican soldiers collecting the bodies of the dead. This is not an uplifting beginning, and it sets the tone for a movie that seems dedicated to eviscerating the memory of the Alamo.

No wonder no one went.

The near-universal Hollywood hatred of the military and America has made it impossible for a mainstream studio to produce a film that is pro-military and pro-American. Yet it is impossible to tell the Alamo story any other way.

And the main forces behind The Alamo are Texans, but seemingly, they are Texans afraid to stand up for the heroic heritage of the Alamo. Houstonian Dennis Quaid plays Sam Houston (badly) as a drunk, a man willing to trade the lives of the men in Alamo for political advantage, and a land grabber. Quaid, who can and has played interesting characters that are bigger than life, instead chooses to play the legendary Houston as an amateurish politician smaller than Dick Gephardt—a portrayal that is particularly bizarre when Quaid-Houston gives a lecture on Wellington’s victory over Napoleon, and the parallel between that and Houston’s strategy to defeat the “Napoleon of the West” (Generalissimo Santa Anna).

The script (by Texans, and strongly influenced by the current generation of Texan historians) aims to cut all the legendary characters down to size—Jim Bowie’s marriage to a (since-deceased) Mexican woman for land-grabbing purposes, Col. Travis’s abandonment of his wife and children, and Davy Crockett’s unspectacular political career are all emphasized.

We are shown a Travis who is petty and petulant, and then when his famous “Victory or Death” letter from the Alamo is read aloud to the Texian Congress, there seems to be no link between the author and the soldier.

Bowie is shown as a cruel slaveholder, as petty as Travis. But he is also shown as enormously popular, not only with his own men, but also with Travis’s men. But there is no indication of why this son-of-a-bitch inspires anyone to anything, much less inspires dozens of men to fight to the death.

In details like the interactions between Generalissimo Santa Anna and his officers, in the visuals of the Mexican Army, the size and detail of the Mission and San Antonio de Bejar, the movie seems true. But where the movie fails to ring true is in its important characters. Only Davy Crockett, the legendary raconteur, fiddler and marksman, and the cruel megalomaniac Santa Anna are consistent and believable. Even they, though, are shadows of the legends. Crockett spends much of the movie talking down his legend. Santa Anna is given a prophetic, but out of character and unbelievable, speech about how post-Alamo Mexican-American relations will develop if the Texians are victorious. And Santa Anna’s legendary daliance with the Yellow Rose of Texas, like Travis’ drawing of a line in the sand, is omitted entirely.

Many of the familiar elements of the legend are omitted, while new and irrelevant elements that do not move the story forward are added. We are informed that Bowie is distressed about the death of his wife, but the only effect of this fact on the story appears to be that Bowie does not follow Houston’s order to abandon the mission and take its cannons. The extended divorce of Travis matters not a whit in the rest of the movie, but, by lowering our estimation of Travis’s moral character, the extended divorce scene and its aftermath makes Col. Travis’ death less like a heroic sacrifice than an appropriate punishment for a deadbeat dad.

The decisive independence battle of San Jacinto, meanwhile, is added as an afterthought without explanation. Houston is outnumbered 2-to-1, but destroys the Mexican army in eighteen minutes. Mexican losses outnumber Texian by nearly twenty times. But the movie does not explain why, and in fact presents the defeat as utterly implausible. Santa Anna is warned, his army is encamped and organized with canons facing the Texians, but no cannon is fired, and the Mexican army does nothing but panic, run and die. The Texians, meanwhile, scream “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember Goliad” but without feeling or meaning. How did the victory occur? What did it mean? No explanation is given.

The Alamo was a legendary moment. The Alamo does not believe in legends. And moviegoers don’t believe in movies at war with their subjects.

–From the May 2004 Austin Review