ACW movie

[Susofrick]

Wicked Spring, battle scene.

[monty]

looks awesome is this movie already out or is it in production

[Cameronian]

Made 2002, mixed reviews, e.g.

'I really liked this movie... it was MUCH better than 'Gods and Generals' and I appreciated the down and gritty, soldier-level perspective of the war. Great movie. I've seen every Civil War feature film available and this one is tops in my book.'

'In a word...slow. It was so painfully boring and slow that my wife and I digitally sped the movie up and it was still way too slow. Some of the story line could have been interesting, but they didn't do anything with the story really and the acting was really not very good at all. We both were left wondering if and when anything was going to happen. And nothing did!...'

Amazon UK has it as a Region 1 import for <£4.

[Bourbaki]

Very very boring, maybe it was the voices of the spanish "actors", and if not wrong that scene is at the begining of the movie , I think I delete it from the hardisk 10 min after that scene

[Tantallon2]

It must be better than Gods and Generals. G&G was one of those films that I watched then tried hard not to think about the fact that I would never get those three hours (it seemed longer) of my life back!

[Paul]

It must be better than Gods and Generals. G&G was one of those films that I watched then tried hard not to think about the fact that I would never get those three hours (it seemed longer) of my life back!

[musketier]

hmmm no wonder they packaged Gods and Generals as a 2 for 1 with Gettysburg
( I too lost more than 3 hours watching G and G it had some good scenes but the 'story' was crap)

[Tantallon2]

I have a theory as to why modern American ACW films are usually so bad (Glory being a magnificent exception) - it is because they have access to all of those enthusiastic re-enactors so everyone wants to show great battle scenes. They also want to be hyper realistic in terms of uniforms, disposition of troops etc and cover every significant officer - all of whom have those really silly (but very authentic) beards that make it impossible to work out who is who.

I suppose for an American audience many of them will be familiar with the characters and battles but for the rest of us it all becomes very confusing and pretty boring. (Actually one of the problems in G&G was simply that the dialogue was spectacularly bad - probably in search of authenticity again). To see how a battle film should be made you don't have to look further than "Waterloo" which managed to combine spectacle with dramatic story telling.

I suppose part of the problem is that the ACW is hallowed ground (still) for many Americans and this gets in the way of story telling which strangely isn't the case for Vietnam where there are possibly scores of really good war films (Green Berets an obvious exception!).

[musketier]

much more accurate

[Maurice]

Gettysburg is a great movie, 5 hours of continues fun, G&G was 3 hours of a pain in the butt, even the battle scenes were amateurish. Hard to believe that both come from the same studio.

This fragment was okay, reminded me of the battle of Little Round Top from Gettysburg, but the sound effects are over the top, too Saving Private Ryan-like IMO.