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Gods and Generals

Gods and Generals purports to be an epic tale of some stuff that happened near the beginning of the Civil War. What that stuff is remains a mystery to me because midway through its nearly four-hour running time, I gave up on it. What a snoozer!

If you want to save yourself four hours, just imagine a bunch of generals giving interminable and way overblown speeches to their troops, followed by a big hurrah! and then a battle scene. In between, there are lots of interminable and way overblown bits where the generals pray to God and accept their fate. Lather, rinse, repeat. My god it was boring.

The movie seems only to want to focus on the generals, and pretty much ignore everyone else. In fact, there were so many generals, you start to wonder if all the officers were just fast-tracked to general. I proposed a drinking game where every time a new general was mentioned, you took a drink. It wouldn't be very fun, though, as you'd be lucky to make it through the first hour.

The battle scenes were intensely boring as well, if you can believe it. A bunch of people died. There was no tension or any particular attachment to anyone. I guess it was supposed to be kind of sad, but it just felt so very ... mechanical.

Luckily, the movie was so long that it splits over two sides of a DVD. So after hitting the intermission, we decided it wasn't going to get any better. This is only the second movie I can remember giving up on before the end. 0/4 stars.