My View Is that GODS AND GENERALS is sui generis and must be judged on the basis upon which it was produced and presented by the producer and the director who did not intend to make a movie which pandered to the modern taste but one which should be categorized in the same class with THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. These are not movies made to increase popcorn sales but because the producer's directors and actors want to tell a greater truth..
If you found GODS AND GENERALS boring, or too long, or too tedious, or too tendentious, that is a subjective reaction which cannot be faulted, except it is not fair to say that a film is too long as though this were an objective truth because that too is to impose one's subjective take on the whole world..
I believe GODS AND GENERALS succeeded brilliantly at what it attempted to do. The critics willfully chose to attack it not for what it tried to do but for what they wanted it to do but never attempted. As liberals, they must destroy this film as they must attack BIRTH OF A NATION . Here is a piece I wrote on FreeRepublic when the movie came out back in March 2003:.
I find this cant about the length of this movie more tedious than any 4 hour film. The shallowness of the observation is reminiscent of the scene in AMADEUS wherein Mozart is told by the king that his music has " too many notes." Either a film is long enough to tell the intended story or it is not. Either it is good or bad but it is never bad merely because it is too long and it is never good because it is short. It must, like Little Red Riding Hood's porrige, be just right and that is determined by length needed to tell the story the film maker intended to tell..
The problem is the critics do not want you to see, hear or know the story as it is told. More, they do not want you to accept any part of this version of the story. So they do what the left usually does, they change the rules of the game. The film maker here is obviously asking to be judged in the historical context of the time. The critics object to the movie because the treatment does not fit their time warp..
These objections are ideoligically motivated. The left, in the context of George Bush's unselfconscious Christian piety, cannot pass benediction on a time and place where it was the norm for such Christian committment to animate reasonable and compelling historical characters to exraordinary nobility..
So the Borking of GODS AND GENERALS proceeds apace..
