Salocin

Gods and Generals

Undoubtedly made for American civil war historians and fanatics, this movie will fail to satisfy even them. Boring us to death with the long-winded religious convictions of the Generals of the time, we watch for hours as the civil war is painted for us through a patchwork of battle scenes and extra-length monologues, the moral dilemmas and national issues of the time lost somewhere up the movies' own posterior, along with it's head.

This self-involved marathon of a film will have its audience's thumbs aggressively twitching as their subconscious seeks the fast-forward button. The movie suffers from having been transposed from paper, and completely fails to engender the kind of involvement from the audience that would allow at least remote sensations of loss at the deaths of so many people at the hands of their own countrymen.

What was undoubtedly a valiant attempt to illustrate the terrible cost of the events prior to Gettysburg results in a cold and emotionless increase in our knowledge of the facts of the time. The lack of attachment formed with the characters resulted in my telling them apart from the size and colour of their beards, which had fortunately been varied to ease the burden on our memories. Characters introduced at the beginning of the movie are only brought back near the end, resulting in a momentary lapse of understanding as we try desperately to remember who this person is and what side of the war they're on.

While moments in the movie let us know the pain that must have been felt by the individuals of the time (such as the Irish brigades on both sides of the conflict having to fire at each other), the construction of the movie doesn't properly build up our emotions such that we care, and I was left with a dispassionate understanding of the horror of it all, without so much as a lump in my throat.

This one-and-a-half DVDs worth of film is definitely worth avoiding. The best thing about it is that it's educational in an intellectual sense. The worse thing about it is that it is part one in a triology. May God have mercy on us all.