Notes before "The Alamo"
Disney's new retelling of the Alamo legend was supposed to come out last year before the holidays, but got bumped after it didn't "test well" with audiences.
It'll now debut on Friday, a badly-buzzed historical epic that'll struggle to do respectable business amid stiff holdover competition from last week's #1-grossing "Hellboy," (gleefully wacky lil' entry there, definately check it out if you haven't already) and the (depressingly) predictable Easter Weekend re-surge for "The Passion of The Christ," which will substantially cut into the "God, guns & glory" crowd that a movie about the Alamo NEEDS to woo to so much as break-even.
Unless it turns out to strike some kind of major chord with audiences, Disney is probably looking at a minor B.O. dissapointment on this one, and it'll be the unceremonious end to a notoriously troubled project. Ron Howard was originally supposed to make this, but backed out when the studio wouldn't spend the necessary money on his vision of an unromantic, strictly-historical retelling of the story which is the stuff of legends to Texans and devotees of traditionalist American historical lore.
To wit: The event involved a ragtag grouping of soldiers and militia who holed up in an abandoned Spanish Mission in a bid to hold back the Mexican Army during the Texas war for independence. After a standoff of many days, the occupants (including frontier legends Davey Crockett and Jim Bowie) were massacred after a nightlong firefight. Not long after, Texas Army general Sam Houston led his troops into battle with the rallying cry of "remember the Alamo" and defeated the Mexicans.
The preview-screening buzz on this was toxic, breaking down as "bad" and "too long." It was pulled for "fixing," and now the first reviews are trickling in sounding not much better, save that "too long" seems to have been supplanted by "confusing." Rottentomatoes.com has the early buzz, and it ain't purty:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/TheAlamo-1131222/
So it looks like either a critical, audience or both-of-those failure is in the offing, no big deal. Happens all the time. EXCEPT...
You can mark my words, if "The Alamo" bombs you can look forward to the story being spun in a peculiarly annoying way by the "Right Wing" press here on the Web and elsewhere. The first shot across the bow on this angle can be seen as-fired here:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37909
Here's the jist of the issue, same old story as usual: The film apparently wants to be "more accurate" in it's portrayal of the iconic real-life heroes, so fellows like Davey Crockett are probably NOT going to be shown in their old-school image as immortal paragons of virtue. That kind of portrayal just doesn't sit well with some critics of the "Culture War," and this is just more grist for the mill of their favorite myth: That "liberal Hollywood" is insidiously trying to "trash" American Patriots with "revisionist" history.
The "mythic" version of Alamo (since there was only one survivor who didn't witness the actual massacre, any retelling is tinged with certain myth to be sure) has already been filmmed a few times: A MEGA-HIT 1950s Disney telefilm of "Davey Crockett" concluded with the Alamo events and is probably the best-known version, (it's also a pretty good film that holds up surprisingly well, the era and the dubious history considered) the most notorious is John Wayne's starring/directing version that contains hardly a shred of real history and officially signaled Wayne's decline as an actor/filmmaker of note.
Just watch and see. If "Alamo" doesn't score at the B.O., it'll largely be because it (apparently) isn't any damn good (I'll have a review up as soon as I see it.) BUT the "spin" from the cultural right will be an attempt to cast this as a "told you so" to their Hollywood "enemies." The angle will be: "REAL Americans have rejected Liberal Hollywood revision of their history, take THAT evil Godless left-wing boogeyman!" Trust me, you'll hear some variation of that coming from a good deal of "culture war" film essayists as the release ticks closer, and if the story has any kind of "legs" it'll make it's way to the Right's bully pulpit, the Fox News Channel.
The Orgasm-Level-Event, though, that the "fight liberal hollywood" crowd is hoping for in this is for "Alamo" to make a bad showing WHILE "Passion" has a resurgance. THEN the spin becomes merely part of the manufactured tale of the Religious Right's 2004 "insurgency" into the "Babylon" of the entertainment world through their new best friend Mel Gibson and his Jesus movie.
Sigh.
Remember the good old days, when a movie like "The Alamo" could suck on it's own and didn't need conspiracy theories to tell us WHY it sucked?
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