Mysterious Circumstance: The Death of Meriwether Lewis

In film class at college... I've seen better. I'm not sure what the script looks like... But execution is delivered. Living in the early 1800s... Everybody is clean.

I felt like I was watching a reenactment. Accents and some of the characters... Misplaced. Costuming, accurate... But definitely not fitting for sleeping in the woods or living in the time. For where they were at.

Script and dialogue... did not captured my attention. I constantly wondered where things were going. So sorry.

I really wanted to like this movie. Have studied Lewis and Clark as a kid and have copies of their journals but this movie seems to have disconnected from history. Almost like somebody got a script and a cheap budget and put a film together. It just did not fit. It did not seem believable and it was a bit of a labor to watch.

I was anxious to watch this and learn something about American history that I was woefully ignorant of.

And I remain so.

After less than 30 minutes, I couldn't take anymore of Governor Meriwether's outrageous and "WAY over the top" antics. I felt as if I were watching a movie from the 1930s with the massively exaggerated movements in whatever he was doing.

The dog was a delight - as are all animals, but he couldn't save Meriweather's performance.

The cell phone text notices going off randomly were also an unwelcomed bonus. If I were a betting person, I'd bet it was the director's phone.

Again - I DID want to like this film!! I tried! "They" just made it impossible.

The dog got it an extra star.

The stories of Lewis and Clark are fascinating, but this movie takes us on a journey on the death of Meriwether Lewis which remains unsolved.

The movie is not a happy story, certainly not humorous, as it offers different versions of how Lewis may have actually died. Evan Williams portrays at least three different versions of Lewis -- depressed, mentally exhausted and broken; confident and dignified; and lustful and careless -- as each possibility is explored.

It starts out slow and odd. In fact, I stopped watching it the first time at about 20 minutes but decided to rewatch it after learning more about the questions that continue of this remarkable man's demise.

The movie does not offer an answer, but instead leaves the viewer thinking -- and hopefully wanting to learn more about this explorer's life and death.

*I give Rex the dog a "10" for his performance as Seaman.

So why create a movie about the death of Lewis of Lewis and Clark, when no one has any idea how he died?

The case is still unsolved and the worst part of the movie is that random, sometimes incredibly stupid stories are made up though two hours of what could have happened......really.....so we get five totally different random stories about what could have happened on the night that he died.

I kept waiting for a conclusion to this stupid movie, but there was not one....just make believe stories....a couple of which were not even believable Why not make up ten stories and make the movie four hours long....two hours wasted....no end.

From reading "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose, I was acquainted with the suspicious "suicide" of the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis at a Tennessee "tavern." "Mysterious Circumstances" is an exploration of alternative versions of what might have happened, filmed with considerable attention to authenticity in locale and the era. Many historians have accepted the "suicide" version, but Lewis was traveling on a notoriously dangerous trail, and shooting oneself twice and then cutting oneself "from head to foot with a razor" is a suspicious "suicide," to say the least. The various accounts of the same event are evocative of Akira Kurosawa's approach to storytelling in "Rashomon" (1950), the one flaw being that the versions here are not clearly accounts by different witnesses to the same events but are perhaps rooted in later speculation by those who found the accepted version singularly bizarre. The first version depicted in this movie seems to be close to the version that prevailed, essentially by default. And it is, indeed, played as singularly bizarre. Two previous reviewers (action addicts, no doubt) rated this movie 1 star; 11 other previous reviewers rated it 9 or 10 stars. No way does this average 4.8. My quick calculation makes it about 7.6. This film is worth watching if you have more than a juvenile attention span and are intrigued by mystery.