Gods and Generals: A Review
A Look at Ted Turner's Second Cinematic Take on the Civil War
Buoyed by the success of Gettysburg, Ted Turner brought the Civil War novel Gods and Generals to the Big Screen. It bombed. Here's why.
Think of a film with tremendous potential that fell flat on its face, and you get Gods and Generals. Gods and Generals was Ted Turner’s second cinematic take on the Civil War, and will probably be his last. And that’s truly a shame.
The late Michael Shaara changed literary history with his milestone, Pulitzer Prize winning account of the battle of Gettsyburg. His novel The Killer Angels, though fictional, was as close to reality as any historical novel could be. He literally resurrected the personalities of Gettysburg and made them larger than life to his 20th century readers. Using the characters’ actual diaries and letters, along with first-hand accounts of their lives and the events surrounding Gettysburg, Shaara recreated the battle of Gettysburg and breathed life into the minds of its principals like no one had ever done before.
Ted Turner Brings the Civil War to Television
It was no surprise then that Ted Turner came along in the early 1990s and brought Shaara’s The Killer Angels to film, first as a limited-release theatrical hit and then as a TNT special and finally VHS (and later DVD) release. Based on The Killer Angels, Gettysburg starred Tom Berenger as the melancholy, reluctant Confederate general, James Longstreet, and Martin Sheen as the celebrated hero of the South, Robert E. Lee. It also featured Jeff Daniels as a handsome professor-turned-dashing war hero Joshua Chamberlain, a role very different from Dumb & Dumber. Turner’s film was a commercial success.
Shaara’s son, Jeff, carried on his father’s legacy by penning a prequel, Gods and Generals, and sequel, The Last Full Measure. Shaara’s two books completed a Civil War trilogy. Both were bestsellers. It was inevitable that Turner would attempt to bring them to the Big Screen (or at least the Small Screen) as well.
When Gods and Generals debuted in theaters in 2003, it bombed…..big time. Cinematic plans for The Last Full Measure were scrapped and Ted Turner’s dream of bringing the Civil War to the Big Screen was aborted.
Why Did Gods and Generals Fail at the Box Office?
The problem is not with Jeff Shaara, who has continued to see commercial success as a historical novelist. Not only were Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure bestsellers, so were his subsequent historical novels, including Gone For Soldiers, Rise to Rebellion, The Glorious Cause, To the Last Man, and The Rising Tide.
For starters, Gods and Generals collapsed of its own weight. It simply tried to be so many things that it ended up doing poorly at just about everything. It was 219 minutes long, and that was after a very awkward and questionable editing job which left quite a few scenes in the can. The finished product was probably one of the most disjointed and meandering films ever to hit theaters.
Jeff Daniels reprises his role as Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, while Robert Duvall replaces Martin Sheen as Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Duvall is actually an inspired choice. He’s much more convincing as Lee than Sheen, who frankly made Lee look like a crazy, religious nut in Gettysburg. Duvall brings a class and dignity to the role, very much in keeping with the Virginia gentleman-general.
Stealing the screen, however, is Stephen Lang as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederacy’s most effective field commander of the early war. Lang plays Jackson to perfection, and almost makes one forget that he also played the unfortunate George Pickett in Gettysburg.
At times heavy-handed and patronizing in its dialogue, Gods and Generals nevertheless does provide a different side of the South to film audiences. Lee and Jackson, it is true, didn’t fight for the South because of race prejudice or a love for slavery. And it is worth pointing that out.
Still, there were many Southerners that did fight for those reasons. In fact, the entire movement for secession in the Deep South began over the issue of slavery. This is a historical fact as the resolutions passed by the Lower South states in 1860 and 1861 clearly show. The filmmakers ignore this, except for some contrived, cardboard lines assigned to Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain about fighting to make men free.
This brings up another fatal flaw. There are too many protagonists and not enough antagonists. Is this a film about Stonewall Jackson? If so, then Chamberlain and Lee get far too much screen time? If it’s about all of them, then this isn’t a movie. It’s a miniseries trying to be a movie.
Recommendation: Gods and Generals is worth it IF you are a Civil War fan
The DVD comes full of bonus features, including some very interesting “making-of” featurettes and a couple impressive music videos by Bob Dylan and Mary Fahl respectively. The commentaries and interviews are also very much worth one’s time.
The bottom line is that Gods and Generals had a lot of potential. Had it been produced as a miniseries or trimmed down to focus on one protagonist (probably Stonewall Jackson), it would’ve fared better. As it is, it’s too top-heavy, too awkward, and too long.
