Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Many of us know the story of the siege of the Alamo from the 1954 Disney version, with Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. More of us know it from the John Wayne 1960 film (which reduced the character of Jim Bowie to another Richard Widmark psychopath and Laurence Harvey's Travis to a b!tchy popinjay, and got Wayne's Crockett involved in a fictional but complicated plot involving an heiress and a scheming yankee quisling). Some of us remember an excellent 1987 TV movie starring James Arness, Brian Keith, Alec Baldwin, and Raul Julia. But most of us know it wrong.

This 2004 version labors hard for accuracy and authenticity, and for the most part achieves its goals. It used the largest set ever constructed in the US, yet it was done on a small budget (though you'd never know it). The production values are excellent, the acting is excellent, in fact everything about this movie is excellent.

It's 1836, and Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid) is headquartered in Goliad, trying to assemble a Texian army. He tells his friend, Jim Bowie (Jason Patric), to head northwest to the village of San Antonio de Bexar and remove all the cannons from the old nearly ruined garrison of the Alamo for the Texians' use. The Alamo, having endured much fighting over the decades, has more cannons in one place than any other battlement in North America. Besides, the Mexican Army was defeated and driven out of San Antonio the year before, swearing never to return, so that armament is no longer needed there.

At that moment, the Texian commander of the Alamo, Col. Neill, is leaving it in the hands of his aide, Lt.Col. William Travis (Patrick Wilson), confident that the bitter winter will stop for months the advances of the Mexicans under their new dictator, Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, "the Napoleon of the West" (Emilio Echevarria - considerably older than the real Santa Ana at age 42). But the dictator is forcing his exhausted army to slog through the snow towards San Antonio.

Bowie arrives to find Travis in charge of a wretchedly underdefended fort. Some of the walls ruined in previous years still haven't been rebuilt (one fact, not mentioned in any of the movies, was that the outer walls were patched with planks, on the exterior and running vertically the reverse of shingles, so that the end of every plank served as a stairstep for the attacking army). Travis seems to know of war only from books. In fact, nearly all the defenders of the Alamo had no real experience of war, having been spared combat in 1812, the most almost any have had is a few skirmishes with Indians. About the same time Bowie arrives, so does former Congressman David Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton), much heralded for heroism that actually was claimed by a character in a vaudeville play. The men of the Alamo insist on staying, and there is conflict over who will be their commander, but Bowie, who is dying from tuberculosis or pneumonia, yields to Travis. The Alamo has fewer than 200 defenders, Santa Ana has about fifteen times that many soldiers - so many that he divided his army with two day's march between the halves, so there would be time for the waterholes to refill and the grass to grow for the soldiers and horses in the latter half.

At this point, everyone will agree that we shift from solid history to a lot of conjecture and flimsy evidence. Walter Lord, in his book, A Time to Stand, emphasizes that assurance of the details of the Alamo defense is virtually impossible; some letters are dated February 30th and survivng eyewitnesses almost never told the story twice the same way, etc.  The conversations and the sequence of events, and other details, are, like the last moments aboard the Titanic, the stuff of scriptwriting. In this movie, unlike some others, we have a ragged band of frontiersmen, all of them increasingly sure of impending death and decreasingly sure that their defense of this small landmark will serve any purpose.

This movie got a drubbing from people who hadn't even seen it because it reportedly used in its historical research some Mexican sources, including one that suggests that Davy Crockett didn't die in hand-to-hand combat with Mexican soldiers. The Fess Parker version left us with Crockett impotently swinging his rifle as Mexican soldiers swarm behind him, but we didn't see him die. The John Wayne version had Crockett as a suicide bomber, deliberately carrying a torch into the gunpowder storage room as the Mexicans close in on him. Using a purported eyewitness account from a Mexican officer, this movie has Crockett overwhelmed and taken alive, brought before Santa Ana and ordered to beg for his life; the protesters might be pleased with his (conjectural) response.

This is not, however, the end of the movie. We turn back to hard-drinking Sam Houston, leading his ragtag army on a prolonged retreat from Santa Ana, withdrawing until Houston can find an ideal location to pitch a battle (which happens to be at San Jacinto).

The film, as I keep babbling, is excellent. The Alamo and its surrounding village had been faithfully recreated. The acting, the special effects, the uniforms, and the battle scenes are all convincing. Some people have complained that this movie is too long (2 hrs 17 min - the John Wayne ordeal was more than a half hour longer than this) and a bit sluggish in parts, but this is a true story, an important story, and not all of these events were dashing or exciting or geared to the low attention span.

If you want to see another version of the doomed defense of the Alamo, I recommend the 1987 TV movie, The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory, with James Arness as Bowie, Brian Keith as Crockett, Alec Baldwin as Travis and Raul Julia as Santa Ana;  this was originally a TV mini-series so the total running time is about twice the Billy Bob version, with a lot more historical insights packed into it. If you want some authentic historic battles, I point you in the direction of the sumptuous Russian production of War and Peace (1968) and the (mostly American & English) 1971 Waterloo.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older