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Review:
 According to
what I've heard. This movie was supposed to be six hours long. The
whole thing was to be a balanced account of the American Civil
War. But six hours sitting in a theater is even too long for me,
so Ronald Maxwell either had to cut it down or make it into two
movies. He made the wrong choice.
The reason is that it's
one long slog instead of two tolerable ones is that the "heroic
journey" of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang) can't quite be
cut in half all that well. This is too bad as the fact simply is
that Jackson, and Gen. Robert E. Lee(Robert Duvall) were
proto-Nazis who were fighting to promote and extend slavery, and
they knew it.
But Maxwell doesn't let us
in on that little fact, giving us instead longwinded crap about
"saving the south from foreign invasion." Yeah, sure. Imagine a
World War II film about those brave German soldiers, touching
briefly on the Jews but going on about what wonderful people
Goring and General Rommel were.
The main story is, as was
said before, mainly about Stonewall Jackson, a religious fanatic
who's callousness was legendary but is shown here as almost warm
and fluffy [he has a humongous beard] There are a number of scenes
of him being cute as a button with a little girl played by Lydia
Jordan, who's convenient death leads Jackson to break down in
tears.
Awwwwwwwwwww
The movie is longer than long
[it has a convenient bathroom break, though], but it seems rushed.
The other plot about Union Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff
Daniels) and his baby brother(C. Thomas Howel), is strangely
truncated. The problem here is political. Maxwell is giving us the
war from the southern side and he seems to have a hard time
admitting the fact that these were the BAD guys.
The most hypocritical
moment in the movie is when Jackson and his valet(Frankie Faison)
area praying by the road and the former tells the latter that the
Confederate government will free the slaves. It makes you want to
slap them both silly. This guy was a traitor!!!!
The only reason to see
this thing are the battle scenes, and these are as good as the
dialogue is bad. In other words, they are utterly brilliant. With
a cast of thousands of hobbyists who know and love this sort of
thing, the depictions of the battles of Fredricksburg and the
Wilderness are pure adrenaline. Some of the best battle scenes
I've seen and the best since that Stalingrad movie from a few
years back.
Nonetheless, it really
isn't worth the money. Wait until it comes out on TV. It appears
that Ted Turner wants the Six hour version on TNT in the fall.
That might be worth the
wait.
Eric Lurio
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