Gods and Generals: Critic Reviews

A trial to sit through: stiff, ponderous, fluttering in its 'poetry,' and crudely simplistic as an apologia for the Confederate ideology.

A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.

Incredibly boring and badly acted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ballooning, jingoistic goat spoor.

Despite boring patches, this $56 million epic is a noble effort.

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.

The movie we see here, though admirable in parts, is numbing as a whole.

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.

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.

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.

A technically proficient but emotionally vacuous historical pageant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

If ever there was a movie that could cause even the most restless sleeper to fall into a deep slumber, this is it.

From the start Gods has a mighty wind of nostalgia and outright historical mythicizing that doesn't go down easily.

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.

All that yapping! -- great swaths of quotations from the Bible and the classics, countless ringing speeches, endless stretches of flowery dialogue.

Meticulous Civil War story runs a little long.