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Gods And Generals is one of those films you would
watch under one of two conditions: Either you’re a Civil War
buff, or you’re being coerced—e.g., watching it in an American
History class because you have absolutely no other choice.
Gods And Generals is a long movie—so long, in fact,
that it has an intermission. With a run time of just under
three and a half hours, you should definitely have a good
reason for letting your ass go numb while you relive the horrors
and intricacies of the first two years of the Civil War.
The second film in a trilogy, Gods And Generals was
adapted for the screen from Jeff Shaara’s book of the
same name and is the prequel to the 1993 film Gettysburg
(based on the book The Killer Angels by Michael
Shaara, Jeff’s father). The story starts off rather slowly
at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, with men from both
the Union and the Confederacy deciding that this war is, in
fact, worth fighting. General Robert E. Lee (Duvall)
agrees to lead the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to
battle. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Daniels), a teacher
of philosophy, leaves his job to become a Lieutenant Colonel
for the Union because he believes in emancipation. While the
film explores the lives of both the generals and infantrymen
who fought in the Civil War—and the women in their lives—Gods
And Generals is mostly concerned with the journey of Confederate
soldier General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson (Lang). He fearlessly
leads his men in a war he firmly believes is God’s will, even
though it ends up costing him his life. Lang’s portrayal of
Jackson is right on target; he easily conveys the sense of
righteousness that Jackson was said to have felt about his
role as a general and about the necessity of fighting in order
to preserve the Confederacy.
The most impressive aspect of this film is not in the acting—it’s
hard to believe that anyone, ever, sounded as stuffy and unnatural
as the nineteenth-century Americans portrayed here—but in
the battle scenes. Instead of using extras, 7,500 “reenactors”
clad in appropriate attire painstakingly reenact the battles
fought during the Civil War for the sake of authenticity,
adding some spice to an otherwise uninteresting story line.
The film would have been about an hour shorter without all
the slo-mo fighting scenes, but what’s a war movie without
hell, death, and destruction? This one, interestingly enough,
isn’t nearly as bloody as it supposedly was in real life,
though that small fact doesn’t detract from the depiction
of the horrendous nature of war. If anything, seeing soldiers
use their comrades’ lifeless bodies as protection from the
hail of bullets whizzing past their heads is more disturbing
than any resulting gore.
There are a few touching moments in this film—two soldiers
silently meeting to share their coffee and tobacco and then
going their separate ways; the infantries looking up into
the night sky after a particularly pernicious battle and seeing
a phenomenon similar to the aurora borealis; General Lee befriending
a young girl whose presence, presumably, fills a void that
exists because he has not yet met his own newborn daughter.
But the overwhelming feeling I got while watching this movie
is that it is long, dull, and not entirely accurate. The slavery
issue is mostly skirted, though there are conversations about
it that suggest that everyone, including the Confederates,
favors emancipation—a lovely idea in itself, but one that,
unfortunately, just isn’t historically true. There are plenty
of Christian God references, which must have been a sign of
the times. If you’re stuck on a battlefield, marching head-on
into enemy fire, praying may not be such a bad idea.
—Sarah Andrews
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out of 5
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