It’s hard to describe the excitement I felt back in 2002 when learning that a major motion picture depicting the Civil War was coming out in 2003, one that was going to be the prequel to Gettysburg and feature many of the same actors who had worked on that film.  This excitement was made even greater due to the fact that this was the first time for me that I would get to see a Civil War movie on the big screen since I had been too young to see movies like Gettysburg and Glory when they came out.  So, needless to say, I marked the date of the movie release on my calendar and eagerly awaited the opening night, my mind hoping that the film would depict something that reenactors have so much trouble showing at our small events, realistic battles with mass casualties and tear jerking scenes of young men dying on the battlefield (all because I don’t want people to forget the horror of the Civil War and what these young men faced, regardless of what they were fighting for).

Unfortunately the movie was a huge let down, one which probably did more harm than good when it comes to making people understand the horrors of the Civil War because it made the characters seem so much different than us (I know people back then were different but Hollywood doesn’t need to emphasis this to the point of making them seem unrealistic and therefore, taking away our ability to identify with them), and needlessly dragged out scenes that should never be present in a movie like ten minutes worth of armies marching along a road or emerging from the woods, generals sitting around listening to a little girl play the piano, Stonewall Jackson poetically talking to God, and so on and so on (anyone who has actually seen the movie will know what I’m talking about).  Even worse, it would start to build up these wonderfully dramatic scenes, ones which viewers would think would lead up into some sort of horrible battlefield sacrifice, but then fade away into a separate scene, completely leaving us in the dark as to what happened with the men we had started to care about.

All that said, there are some positive aspects to this movie, though not enough to bring it out of the snoozer category.  Those moments are the three battle scenes it depicts, Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville , the Robert E. Lee explanation in the beginning as to why he won’t fight for the north, the scene where all these men of the south are joining up to fight, and the Stonewall Jackson commentary on slavery, all of which can easily be viewed by using the Chapter Selection on the DVD, therefore making it so one does not have to waste time with the entire movie.  

My suggestion, they should have made this movie into a HBO mini-series like Band of Brothers or John Adams rather than trying to fit everything into a motion picture, and they should have limited the poetic moments, which are touching at first, but get old really fast - sort of like the hundreds of breathtaking waterfalls one will see on a tropical vacation, very cool on the first day, but then pretty dull by the last day.