dtweaver

I didn't even want to watch this movie after reading Maltin's review and 1 1/2 star rating. I watched it anyway on the advice of my son and found it much better than I expected. I would give it 2 1/2 stars out of a 4 star system. You have to watch the movie more than once to understand it all. If you don't know much about religion, you will miss a lot. I graduated from high school the year the movie was made, so maybe I can relate to it better. Yes, there is some pretension in the movie and it's weird to some extent, but that was the 70s so what do you expect. I can see why people might not like the movie; however, I cannot understand people saying it is boring. The movie is anything but boring. You will either hate it or love it. If you find it boring, you are probably brain dead.

I loved the book Killer Angels and I have watched the film version, Gettysburg, at least a dozen times, so I was looking forward to Gods And Generals. The movie tried my patience. It was four hours of unrelenting tedium. Stephen Lang just is not up to playing Stonewall Jackson. I looked forward to seeing Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee, but he was not given enough of a role. Furthermore, he looked like an old man who belongs in nursing home. The dialogue was bad. The computer generated backdrops looked like they were done on a Commodore 64 or Vic 20. Jeff Daniels has gotten so fat, he doesn't look a tough military man. The domestic scenes dripped with Palmolive and the scenes with blacks were a blatant attempt to rewrite Southern whites' relations with blacks. A pitiful movie. I just hope when Ted Turner makes The Last Full Measure, he goes back to the standards of Gettysburg (minus the fake beards, of course).