In lieu of dialogue, the actors spend most of their time looking wistfully up to heaven or scanning the mist-shrouded horizon while delivering endless homilies about the rightness of the cause and the place of God in human affairs. Maxwell is unable to bring a single character in his film to convincing life (with the possible exception of `Stonewall' Jackson, who gets to carry the burden of what little drama the film has almost single-handedly). Despite a handful of `name' players in the cast (Robert Duvall, Jeff Daniels, Mira Sorvino and even Ted Turner in a ludicrous cameo appearance), writer/director Ronald F. `Gods and Generals,' which begins right after the firing on Fort Sumter and ends shortly before the Battle of Gettysburg, is the first part of a planned trilogy. `Gods and Generals' may be a more `realistic' war film than `Gone With the Wind' (what wouldn't be?), but it's not nearly as entertaining. Grueling and plodding, the film is almost the antithesis of `Gone With the Wind,' in that while both films are epic tales told from the viewpoint of the defeated South, `Gods and Generals' (unlike the earlier film) has been essentially drained of all emotion, drama and characterization. `Gods and Generals' plays less like a movie and more like a three-hour-and-49-minute long lesson in Civil War history.
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