Most memorable line (subtitle):

“Saddam Hussein’s ambition is just to rule Iraq. These incompetents want to rule the world.”

Well, no, he didn’t say “Saddam Hussein”; he said “Santa Ana”. And he said “Mexico” instead of “Iraq”. And he didn’t use the word “incompetents”, but something shorter, pithier, and with much the same meaning. But when I saw this line slapped across the bottom of the screen, the quote above is what came immediately to mind …

This is advertised as a remake of the 1960 film starring John Wayne as Davey Crockett (there was also a 1936 film of the same name). I don’t know why. What it is a remake of, like the John Wayne film and, presumably, the 1936 film, was a historical event: the investment by a large contingent of the Mexican army of a hundred-year-old church in the village of San Antonio de Bejar (now the metropolis of San Antonio, in Bexar County, Texas) and the eventual massacre of almost two hundred defenders, including a couple of genuine American folk heroes — Jim Bowie, he of the knife that still bears his name, and former Congressman Davey Crockett, he of the coonskin cap (“…King of the Wild Frontier…” for those who are old enough to remember Walt Disney’s version of Crockett).

When Mexico became independent of Spain in the 1820s, it invited anybody who wanted to immigrate to help populate its sparsely-settled northern frontier, and lots of people out on the frontier of the United States decided to take Mexico up on the offer and move into Texas. From the start there were irritations, most obviously the fact that newly independent Mexico had banned slavery in its territory, and many of the American immigrants wanted to bring their slaves with them. This little problem could be gotten around, of course; slaves in Texas were no longer “slaves”, but simply bound by lifetime contracts (which they no doubt signed with “X”, being, for the most part, illiterate, as American law demanded) which, to their owners, meant that they were still property, whatever the law might say.

Perhaps a worse irritation, in the 1830s, was the fact that General Antonio López de Santa Ana, in some ways the Saddam Hussein of his era (though, not being familiar with the recent Iraqi dictator, he preferred to liken himself to Napoleon), took over Mexico, ripped up its constitution, and began to rule it with an iron hand. When Texicans of American origin (and no few Hispanic Tejanos) rose up against this, Santa Ana took his army into Texas to administer a most draconian lesson. He administered that lesson at the Alamo. The film goes beyond the Alamo to climax with the counter-lesson that was administered by Sam Houston at San Jacinto.

In a sense, though, this is a film not so much about the Alamo as about people reacting to extremely adverse (military) circumstances. And they’re all people, capable of being heroes as well as villains, from (Lieutenant-)Colonel William “Buck” Travis (Patrick Wilson), commander of the regulars at the Alamo, who has just abandoned his wife (who can no longer tolerate his whoring) and who insists on a dandy’s uniform, but who refuses to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds, through drunken, consumptive “Colonel” Jim Bowie (Jason Patric) of the irregulars, Sam Houston’s representative in the fortress, who even though he would rather die so he can rejoin the wife he lost sometime back will still fight on from his deathbed, to the real hero of the piece, Davey Crockett (though he prefers “David”), played masterfully by Billy Bob Thornton, who has worn a coonskin cap only since “that feller playing me started wearing one on stage”, and who, having experienced the genuine horrors of war in his youth (and who understands all too well that the most lasting horrors of war are the ones suffered by the winners, the losers being mercifully dead — ask him why he can’t eat potatoes any more!), would like nothing better than to slope over the wall one dark night and disappear, “but people are watching, and they expect things”. Someday I must watch the 1960 The Alamo and see how John Wayne’s Davey Crockett stacks up to Billy Bob Thornton’s.

The Mexicans, though they also get screen time, are less well defined, but they also have their reactions to things. Santa Ana (Emilio Echevarría) is the typical dictator, unamenable to see reason. Some of his officers share his predilections — see the young colonel, in one staff briefing scene, smiling avidly at the thought of massacring all those Americans — while others, more experienced, try as far as they can to reason with him. Santa Ana, of course, has his own reasons, besides simple bloodthirstiness and a desire for revenge ⁽¹⁾, though of course those play a role, too. “If we lose here,” he says, “our children, nay, our grandchildren, will be begging for crumbs from the Americans,” an accurate prediction, I was told later by someone who is from Mexico and never had much use for the historical Santa Anna. ⁽²⁾ Note, by the way, that the Mexican army, in attacking The Alamo, lost at least three to four times as many men as died among the defenders.

All in all, if you can stomach the battle scenes and blood — and the noise (this is apparently one of those films for which the contracts with the movie houses require that volume be turned up full, at least during the violent scenes) — this is one worth seeing.

⁽²⁾ Santa Ana was the only Mexican ruler to lose territory to the United States. He did it three times, two of them in war. By the third time (“The Gadsden Purchase”) he had figured out that you could at least get money from the Americans for surrendering territory to them; apparently he had mellowed a bit with age. As far as capturing or holding territory was concerned, “The Napoleon of the West” was no more competent than Saddam Hussein.