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Movie Reviews
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The Alamo. Dir. by John Lee Hancock. Imagine Entertainment
/ Touchstone Pictures, 2004. 137 mins.
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A funny—or not so funny—thing happened on the way to
making what was conceived as a historically complex version of the
Alamo's story: 9/11. Though the Walt Disney Company had agreed to
make The Alamo at least two years before the World Trade
Center fell, the film was reconceived in the year after that event.
By the summer of 2002, The Alamo had lost its director (Ron
Howard) and its star (Russell Crowe), and the screenplay by John
Sayles was undergoing a major rewrite. Howard was replaced by John
Lee Hancock, Crowe was replaced by Dennis Quaid, and Sayles's screenplay
was rewritten by a team of script doctors. The 2004 release of The
Alamo culminated what had been a long and public struggle to
make this film.
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Howard's expressed interest was based
on his desire to correct the historical inaccuracies found in the
John Wayne–directed The Alamo (1960), a creature of
the Cold War and Wayne's rightist politics. In addition, Howard
was intrigued by the complexities of ethnic conflict and the issues
of U.S. expansion that the Alamo story presented. Said Howard upon
leaving the project, "I realized that there was a disconnect between
the studio and I as to how the film should be approached." The completed
version of the film retains vestiges of Howard's vision, but they
are largely submerged within a film that was built by committee
in a post–9/11 United States.
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The battle of the Alamo as a historical
event, like Custer's Last Stand, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and
now 9/11, stands as one of the galvanizing events in the narrative
of U.S. history, providing a tale of tragic commitment to the cause
of U.S. nationalism. Ideally, the story would lead to the redemptive
annihilation of those who had killed these tragic heroes. Richard
Slotkin's broad concept of "regeneration through violence" and his
more focused discussion of the cultural significance of Custer's
Last Stand in his study The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985)
help us see the cultural work that this film attempts to do and
the way it fuses residual myth and contemporary events. For such
myths to perform their cultural work, we must see those who died
in the events as martyrs for the greater national cause. Apparently
Howard was at least going to mitigate that mythology. The film as
released embraces it, though in a somewhat diffuse way.
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