Reception
According to Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 30% 'rotten' rating, with two-thirds of its "top critics" making that same assessment; the consensus states "Too conventional and uninvolving to be memorable." Variety called it a "a historically credible but overly prosaic account of the most celebrated episode in the creation of an Americanized Texas."
The Houston Chronicle gave the film a grade of "B", saying Hancock, who the paper points out is a "former Houstonian", "shows respect if not reverence for his state's mythical heritage, even while viewing it from modern perspectives"; it notes the "build-up to battle is prolonged and talky, and for a classic tale of heroic defiance, this Alamo feels more restrained than rousing. Again, it's no-win. When Hancock supplies history, the action and drama bog down. And even when he's right, he's wrong, since so many historians disagree about what happened at the site in what is now Downtown San Antonio." Entertainment Weekly gave it a "C+", saying "Hancock's moderate, apolitical, war-is-hell dramatization of the famous 1836 battle that shaped the future of a free and independent American Texas isn't nearly the flop that the exceptionally harsh and unavoidable advance chatter has suggested it is. (It's not the jingoistic call to patriotism of John Wayne's 1960 version, either.) But The Alamo never harmonizes into a cinematic experience any more resonant than the average, manly, why-we-fight pic, or coalesces into a stirring cry for freedom." According to Roger Ebert, "Conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that any movie named The Alamo must be simplistic and rousing, despite the fact that we already know all the defenders got killed. (If we don't know it, we find out in the first scene.) Here is a movie that captures the loneliness and dread of men waiting for two weeks for what they expect to be certain death, and it somehow succeeds in taking those pop-culture brand names like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and giving them human form."
The movie was a financial failure. First weekend earnings were only US$ 9.1 million, and its opening was overshadowed by a resurgent The Passion of the Christ. The film had taken in less than $30 million U.S. domestic earnings by the second month of release; worldwide foreign gross was slightly less than $26 million. The Alamo was one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
Read more about this topic: The Alamo (2004 film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)