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I always find it interesting to read two separate movie reviews and wonder if they saw the same movie. Take Gods and Generals. Rod Dreher has some very interesting ruminations over at National Review Online. Here are some key points:

The film is about conflicting ideas of patriotism, God, personal conscience, and history. Its basic point is that Lee and Jackson (like many southerners) fought not because they loved slavery or detested the Union, but because they felt honor-bound to defend their homeland.

Religion is an integral part of Gods and Generals, particularly on the southern side. Lee and Jackson are forever talking about God’s will ? Jackson at one point refers to his men as “the Army of the Lord,” as he is about to execute deserters ? but don’t seem much troubled by the question as to whether or not their cause is just in His eyes. Jackson is a true Christian Stoic, believing that man’s role was to be largely passive as the will of God worked itself out through history . . . There were tremendous historical consequences from this clash of religious visions. A soldier in battle must believe God is on his side in order to bear the pain and suffering of war, yet there is great danger in presuming that the Almighty endorses your actions. He is infinite; we are finite. Gods and Generals is filled with challenging theological questions, but the movie appears to have struck historically and theologically illiterate reviewers as showing little more than a bunch of Bible-thumping rednecks sitting around talking about Jesus while fighting to keep the slaves back on the plantation . . . Maxwell told me he made Gods and Generals “without judgment of that generation” of men who fought the Civil War. It wouldn’t have been true to history to make a film depicting a simplistic conflict between good and evil. Slavery was completely indefensible, but there was more to that war and the men who fought it than race hatred.

The ideas Rod discusses are fascinating to me but not having seen the movie I can’t judge whether the movie artfully communicates them or not.

One person who feels that the movie failed in its ambition is James Bowman:

After three and a half hours, you will stagger out of Gods and Generals, Ronald F. Maxwell?s prequel to Gettysburg, stupefied with pathos. From the start, it offers the full Ken Burns treatment of the Civil War, with weepy violins and catch-in-the-throat personal commentary of a highly authentic character, and it never lets up. As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Dickens?s Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it.

And

Even more disastrously, Maxwell and Jeff Shaara, author of the novel he adapted, seem to labor (and boy do they labor!) under the misapprehension that the soldiers of the Civil War were a species of preachers, their minds ever fixed on higher things and inclined to drone on about the higher things in embarrassingly poetic speeches.

In the end, Bowman is sympathetic but believes the movie fails:

One wants to be as generous as possible to this film because in some ways it is very daring. For one thing, it has the boldness to represent Confederate soldiers as human and sympathetic; for another it offers a welcome contrast to the war movies of the past two or three decades, which generally start from the premiss that all the shooting makes no sense at all and is undertaken either by drug-crazed psychopaths (most Vietnam movies) or by decent men with obscure private motivations of their own (The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan). But here we go to the opposite extreme, where all the characters speak and act like monumental statuary. Clearly some kind of balance ought to be struck.

Ben Domenech comes down somewhere in the middle:

Gods and Generals is a war movie in the old broad style, Longest Day fashion, as opposed to the fast-paced gore of so many modern war movies. Big, sprawling, occasionally stagnant, but ultimately a fulfilling and fine film experience. The on-location re-enactments were haunting.

With all this discussion perhaps I will need to break down and watch it. Although I usually avoid historical movies because I am distracted trying to figure out if they are accurate. I also avoid long movies as they tire me out. I also avoid the Civil War as a subject. I have a touch of the historians jealousy. The Civil War is one of those popular subjects that get all the glory. Bookstores are usually full of stuff on the Civil War, WW II, and Vietnam. The rest of history get short shrift. So I am always a little wary of the Civil War buffs. But maybe I will slog through this one and see what all the hubbub is about.