Gods and Generals Reviews
Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.
Time Out
Top CriticThe procession of monotonous, oddly gore-free battles breaks frequently for bloated speechifying.
Four hours including the intermission, I felt like I was seeing the Civil War in real time for awhile there.
It was made strictly by and for Civil War buffs who insist that every pious speech and every skirmish is worthy of filming, even if the end result suffers from serious battle fatigue.
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| Original Score: 2/5
A movie that crams in so many faces, chronological details and endlessly ham-handed stretches of dialogue that the impact of the legitimately moving segments is considerably diminished.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a plodding, episodic film, reverent and sanctimonious, and its pro-Southern viewpoint -- a time-honored Hollywood tendency -- makes Gone With the Wind look like a Northern polemic.
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| Original Score: 1/4
What the filmmakers fail to recognize is that history on the page is quite different from what it needs to be onscreen, namely alive and visceral.
| Original Score: 1/4
It may not be the worst war epic ever made -- that probably would be Battlefield Earth -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
A shameless apologia for the Confederacy as a divinely inspired crusade for faith, home and slave labor.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
An inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.
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| Original Score: 1/4
A viewing of this epic is likely to leave all but the geekiest Civil War buffs feeling as itchy and as restless as if they themselves were wearing woolen underwear -- soggy, unwashed, vintage 1860s, government-issue woolen underwear.
One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms or what it's like to face a rank of men shooting at you, or to jam a bayonet into somebody's guts or have one jammed into your guts.
It's less a movie than a salute to a troubled moment in our history, a movie so steeped in nobility that you half expect it to swoon with reverence for itself.
| Original Score: C
Few of [the actors] are able to compete with the wigs and the platitudes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
On the big screen ... Gods and Generals plays woefully stiff, hampered by the breadth of its source material and the reams of exposition required to explain the action.
| Original Score: 3/5
General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else -- the Civil War, for example -- and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It is so lacking in flesh-and-blood characters, so unclear in its depiction of battles like Bull Run, and so nauseating in its gruesome sentimentality that it is all but unwatchable.
| Original Score: 1/4
Bad actors or normally competent ones (Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang) serve up stilted deliveries of stilted dialogue in a near-flashback to the filmstrips we used to see in school.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
All that yapping! -- great swaths of quotations from the Bible and the classics, countless ringing speeches, endless stretches of flowery dialogue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Despite boring patches, this $56 million epic is a noble effort.
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| Original Score: C+
Maxwell, a TV movie director with no ear for dialogue that isn't over the top and no eye for the sort of visual poetry these stories demand, is plainly not up to the job.
| Original Score: 1/5
A technically proficient but emotionally vacuous historical pageant.
The movie we see here, though admirable in parts, is numbing as a whole.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
At times, the film can feel like a historical pageant, stiff and heavy-handed.
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| Original Score: C-
A trial to sit through: stiff, ponderous, fluttering in its 'poetry,' and crudely simplistic as an apologia for the Confederate ideology.
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| Original Score: D+
If ever there was a movie that could cause even the most restless sleeper to fall into a deep slumber, this is it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
American history transformed into a museum movie, consistently making the flawed human characters at the heart of the Civil War into flawless figures Olympian in their statuesque remoteness.
From the start Gods has a mighty wind of nostalgia and outright historical mythicizing that doesn't go down easily.
Ballooning, jingoistic goat spoor.
