Rating: 
Summary: As painful as a battlefield amputation.
Review: For what it is worth (maybe nothing), I will be honest and admit that I could only bear to watch the first hour or so of this turgid mess. The battle scene I saw was quite well done, but everything else was slow, preachy, and painfully obvious. It is a sad movie when the extras (probably Civil War reenactors who do this sort of thing on the weekends) were more engaging than the main characters. The dialog was stilted, and the actors gave us neither grand passion nor subtlety. I would've given it "zero" stars, but that wasn't an option.
Rating: 
Summary: Duds and Generals
Review: Despite the fact that "Pastor" Lovelace wants to believe the majority of low ratings are due to Confederate-bashing by Yankees, the truth is this was just not a very good film. Like many people, I enjoyed Gettysburg, and looked forward to its prequel. "Gods and Generals" focused very heavily on the military leaders such as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and Joshua Chamberlain. Time spent showing us Jackson talking to God time and again (ALRIGHT! We GET it, Jackson is a spiritual man!), or Chamberlain quoting literature (as inspiration?) just before going into battle, could have been deleted without taking anything away from the film. Or, better yet, that time could have been devoted to showing some of the average soldier's life, or citizens of Virginia discussing secession, or even some of the Virginia legislature, which had to involve some passionate arguments. The redundancy was also hard to get past - how many times do we have to hear soldiers quote some variation of "To those about to die, I salute you"? Or see every brigade involved in one battle, clearly labled for the viewing audience, charging through the same spot of woods and up the same hill? The actors that seemed so inspired in Gettysburg feel like they are merely going through the motions on this one. The third part to this trilogy still holds some promise; let's hope they keep it shorter and more engaging.
Rating:
Summary: Bad costumes
Review: I've been reading the reviews here of this film. One thing needs to be clarified , the uniforms and costumes in this movie were dreadful. Costume shop, sutler row sweep up mostly ,ill fitting ,and often grossly inaccurate , although a few were barely okay and some of the better reenactors managed to get in a rare closeup. Adding the Irish flags on the Confederate side at Fredericksburg was another bit of fantasy. Joshua Chamberlain had a full beard up until only a few weeks before Fredericksburg. In addition the 20th Maine was only lightly engaged in this particular battle. The streets of Frederickburg looked like where it was filmed, Harper's Ferry which looks nothing like Fredericksburg. The beards looked as phony as in "Gettysburg".Most of the lead female characters had modern hairstyles which shows no attention was given in the civilian area either. Aside from managing to bore the life out of me with a subject I love, it was annoying that these other areas are being represented as done well, they were as awful as the rest of this mess.
Rating:
Summary: Gods and Generals
Review: Braveheart was 3 1/2 hours, Heat was 3 1/2 hours, The Godfather was 3 1/2 hours. The difference between those movies and ";Gods"; is that they were awesome because they were entertaining. This movie was as enthraling as a proctologist convention on ritalin. In the first 2 hours and 15 minutes there are two battles. The first one lasts all of three minutes, and the second one was the only thing that kept me from walking out at that point. Then there was the intermission! Gee, I don't know if I can handle another hour and a half of that much excitement! If I wanted to see people revel in the confedracy and praise god in the same breath, I could have tuned in to Jimmy Swaggert marathon instead, and saved myself the trouble. In Other Words, if you've happened to find ten dollars on the street that you simply can't find a purpose for, your wife is on a tour of the world - with your brother, your dog is at the vet, your fish are dead, your kids are at camp, every neighbor and friend you've ever known is out of town, and the only thing on tv is infomercials, than this movie is for you. Or, just stay at home and play with your bellybutton instead - you'll thank me for it.
Rating: 
Summary: TOO PREACHY!
Review: I'm very interested in the Civil War and I really wanted to love this film. However, the obvious, somewhat politically-charged speeches in this film are almost laughable. 200 men, stone-cold silent, listening to the speech of their commander??! Jeff Daniel's Chamberlain was annoying. I know he was a professor fighting in the war, but all his lines were to "teach" a lesson. The very little authentic dialogue between the characters resulted in not really even caring about their fates. I felt no emotional connection with the characters, but instead, felt like I had been hit over the head with speech making about war. On the positive side, some of the images of the film are quite moving. Maybe a silent version of the movie would have been better!
Rating:
Summary: Viewing is not recommended... Purchasing?
Review: Keep in mind when reading my review, I prefer a good documentary over a stellar Hollywood production on any given day. I must agree with most of the Amazon reviewers, "a lost chance at telling a great story." A line-up of great actors cannot salvage the poor dialogue and action sequences, and lack of historical perspective in this movie. Forget any notion that this film will tell the South's long suppressed and much warranted provocation for battle. The film focuses a great deal on Stonewall Jackson, but mostly in his bonding with a child while wintering between battles. The film supplants motivation on the part of its participants.
You'll hear melodramatic conversations between the great Civil War officers (Jackson, Chamberlain, Lee) and their wives and associates; explaining "why I am going to war for this side or against that." Unfortunately, these conversations are more revealing of the director's missed desire to hit a theatrical high note than a historical revelation. You'll also view exchanges between "common soldiers", trying to encapsule those elements, opposite of their noted leaders, rooted in simplicity and humor in the face of great events and tragedy. Simple, but not endearing. I was little stirred by any character in this movie. The war scenes are not very telling of historical significance or bearing much resemblance to the likeness of battle. My pulse gradually slowed watching these scenes, but I did remain awake. An amazon reviewer wrote that he cheered for the Rebels and booed the Yanks like a sporting event. What else could make these scenes entertaining except perhaps consuming a large quantity of alcohol and imagining naked women, wearing only bandoliers and carrying muskets, charging Stonewall's brigade at Bull Run while he fires rose petals from a Napolean Smoothbore. Most all wars, especially the U.S. civil war, contain a wealth of story-telling opportunity. This opportunity was squandered. It is my fortune to know many of the stories, but I cannot thank Gods and Generals for any enlightenment. In short, the movie seemed to aspire for epic proportions, but I fear will fall into the category of so many outdated 'made for T.V. historical dramas"... Soon forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Simply not Gettsyburg
Review: I looked forward to this DVD as I had really enjoyed Gettysburg. While Gettysburg was spectacular, this DVD was just plain average. The first hour could have been cut down to about 15 minutes without the hokey dialogue between Stonwall Jackson and himself, and God. This DVD is the Southern Apologetic for the Civil War on a much grander scale than Gettsyburg, which was much more fair and balanced. The good parts to this DVD were the movie camerawork was brilliant, but it just moved along way too slow. A smaller version may have been a lot better. Joseph Dworak
Rating:
Summary: Historically accurate, but hokey dialogue....
Review: I had great hopes for this film... I mean c'mon, Duvall as Gnrl. Lee? You gotta love that! Unfortunately the great acting strengths of the cast were not fully realized, and in my opinion it is largely due to three major faults: The story focused a bit too much on Stonewall Jackson's religious fervor and his Southern-gentlemanly ways rather than spreading the story around a bit more to get the military strategem of Genrals' A.P. Hill and Lee more into the story. Secondly, the ridiculous amount of melodramatic lines in the script detracted from it's realism. The final issue is the biggest problem I had with the film, and I will get to after I give the movie a few kudos. There were many plus sides that shouldn't be overlooked: The costumes were amazing, (if I had it my way, the old CSA Dress Greys would be the official dress uniform of the current US Army), and the cinematography was outstanding. The casting was outsatanding (it was good to see C.Thomas Howell resurface after all these years), and some of the battle sequences (from a logistical standpoint anyway) were right up there with the epic sequences in Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.... but the truth of these scenes brings me to my final criticism... The movie could have sacrificed the PG-13 rating in favor of an R if by more accurately portraying the violence in a more brutal and therefore more effective way. War is a theatre of unspeakable horror, and the War Between the States was the second bloodiest conflict in American History - yet the shock and horror of it all are lost in this film in favor of the romanticism and political ideologies we see expressed. Because we don't see the violence portrayed in the same sobering way that it was splattered across the screen in Blackhawk Down, it simply doesn't convey an effective image of combat. Yes, there is too much violence on a whole in American entertainment, but this IS a WAR film, and to truly show how horrible it was for both sides, the filmmaker owes it to the fallen by not subduing the image of reality in combat. I served in the 1st Cavalry Division during Dessert Storm, and I always had a problem with war re-enactment groups (like the ones used in the film) because there is nothing romantic or glorifying about seeing someone blown apart. Costumes, flags and nostalgia should not be allowed to overshadow the end sum of conflict, and Duvall's Robert E.Lee aludes to exactly what I am getting at after the scene in Chancellorsville: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of
it." This was one case where one line of dramatic dialogue was fitting, and it said more by itself than most of the rest of the film did collectively.
Rating: 
Summary: 3 men and 3 battles in the 2nd American revolution
Review: I finally had the opportunity to watch _Gods and Generals_ last night. I watched it, my wife went to bed after 2 hours of the 4 hours, partly because she needed to get up to go to work this morning, but mostly because i think she gets tired of me cheering for Johnny Reb. I am an unashamed Southern sympathizer even though i was raised in southern California, it may very well be genetic however as my mom's people come from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the one time i met my grandfather it was pretty obvious he was Southern. I watched the movie, absorbed by the characters, heart raced by the battle scenes, in tears at the horror and destruction of war. I yelled at the lines of foolish men throwing their lives into a pit as the walked into the hail of cannonfire and minibullets (come to think of it my wife might of disliked that part to), laughed as 1 of the 3 main characters hailed from Maine (my wife's adopted state), a college professor of history and philosophy, but warmed up to him as he quoted Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon at length just before a battle. So in general i acted like a crazy football fan at the finals, cheering the Gray and booing the Blue. But as i reflect upon the movie, it is the Christianity of the Generals that comes through most strongly, and here i am as little impartial as i am to the participants. I share in the conservative faith of Jackson, i think Robert Dabney is one of the best theologians America has ever raised up. I was truely amazed that a movie would be done in modern secular anti-theistic America where the lead characters really pray, really believe, really love the Lord, (Wow, how did that get past the censors?) or be thought to make any money? Their faith is not dumbed down, the hard parts are presented as in where Jackson sits and cries for the death of a little girl by scarlet fever as his men remark-but he didnt cry for all the men we've lost. The minority view of the war is presented straight forward at several places: the Civil War as the Second American Revolution, the role of the Irish, slavery as a side issue not the important one, the contradictory role of the races in Jackson's praying with his black cook, or the protection of a white family's house by their brave women slave and her children and her talk to northerners about wanting to be free, for example. I had even hoped that somewhere on the extra disk would be several alternative endings where the South won. And this is where my thinking is pushed by this most extraordinary movie, alternatives. They all revolve around the Faith and slavery, Biblical Christianity and ethnic relationships where a history of such epic proportions and such real horror intertwine with fundamental principles and good sound religious belief. This is the great value of the movie being as true as it possibly can to the historical conditions of the Civil War, for it was a religious as well as an economic, (industrial v. agarian), political (right to sucession), or what-have-you war. This is often minimized in our era of weak believism, mild feelings about religious things, a general feelings that religion isn't a great motivator, money and politics are. Well, secular America meet your great great grandparents, see their religious beliefs mirrored in the young suicide bombers in Israel, or the car bombers in Iraq. Religious beliefs are worth dying and even killing for, today as they where in 1861-4. But it is in the mixture of truth and error that the movie hints at in the relationship of the races that is to me the takehome message that i need to dwell on, for those issues are not finished in today's America and the war was finished so long ago. Jackson (not in the movie but in real life) knelt with slaves in church, praying to the same Lord. Lee owned slaves, Dabney defended slavery in a book 20 years after the war. The South did fight to preserve the 'peculiar institution', slavery, abolitionists where Christians as well, although often Unitarians not Presbyterians. And this is where the present hits 1861 headon, and the power and the bright coloration of history so as to make it alive and real in the movie has great value. This is the extraordinary opportunity that the movie gives us, to revisit and re-evaluate our past, as if the issues are meaningful to us, important to us as they were to Jackson, or Lee, or whats-his-name you know the Maine guy. That is why i recommend even Yankees to watch the movie, to learn what moved our ancestors in a way that a book just can't do. So thanks all of you who contributed to this movie for an accurate picture of a piece of the War for Southern Rights.
Rating:
Summary: Better then Gettysburg
Review: Gods and Generals gives a much better portrayal of Robert E. Lee then Gettysburg. Robert Duval was superb in bringing to life the wisdom and demeanor of Robert E. Lee. For those that have seen Gettysburg, Martin Sheen presents Robert E. Lee as a weak, limp wristed and insecure character. Duval's strength of character can only be rated as "Oscar" quality. Even more descriptive and the majority of the movie was Stonewall's character which was also awe inspiring. His portrayal was on the mark and gave a sense of the honor and dignity that drove the southern military leaders to support state, family and friends above rogue nationalism.
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