I have a "love-hate" relationship with
Gods & Generals. I love the opening with the flags and the song "Going Home." I love that there are a lot of small details that are based on historic facts. I've read several primary source accounts that verify things that were portrayed in the film. And when I visited the Manassas National Battlefield Park, I was blown away when I saw the VMI jacket (with the fatal bullet hole) of Cadet Charlie Norris, a young man featured in the film. He was the guy who said, "C'mon boys! Quick and we can whip 'em!" Right before he impulsively ran ahead without orders to charge the Union lines.) I did not know the story was true and I was amazed to see the truth revealed to me and not just be reading the story in a book. Indeed, there are a lot of facts and stories I did not know about the Civil War before I saw this film.
But
Gods & Generals is a major disappointment as a movie. The film is a celluloid monument to the Lost Cause. It is the spiritual successor to
Gone With the Wind and that movie is the spiritual succesor to
Birth of a Nation. Anyway, when I saw
Gods & Generals in the theatres in 2003, I couldn't define what the Lost Cause was if someone asked me because I was unfamiliar with the term, though I knew the ingredients of it: the war was fought over states' rights. many Black people were faithful servants to their masters. Southerners fought hard but they were beaten by superior numbers. They lost not because they were poor soldiers. They lost because the North beat them with overwhelming resources.
Many of the scenes are bad history, plain and simple. The opening scene with Robert E. Lee and Preston Blair is just wrong from top to bottom.
I've written a blog post about this. In the next scene, which takes place April 1861, where the movie introduces Jackson, the caption on the screen says "Major Thomas Jonathan Jackson, U.S. Army." Another mistake. Jackson had resigned from the US Army in 1851 and never went back. He resigend to become a professor at VMI and the uniform he wears in that scene is the blue uniform of the Virginia State Militia... not the blue uniform of the Federal Army. If you watch the scene, take a look at his belt buckle- it's a Virginia State belt buckle.
And the scene before Fredericksburg where Jackson tells Jim Lewis that some people in the Confederate High command are seriously contemplating enlisting Blacks as soldiers as pure and simple BS. I don't believe this conversation ever took place.
This movie presents a sanitized, Christian Confederacy that reluctantly finds itself thrown into an unwanted war. It shows slavery as such a benign institution, that when Martha Beale and Jim Lewis speak of the desire for freedom, you almost wonder why they would want to leave the wonderful life they apppear to already have. It's nice that it gets details right like someone's uniform or the rifles the 1st Virginia used or whatever... but by misrepresenting the big stories of slavery and what the Confederacy was really about... all of the historic facts it painstakingly got right are sacrificed to Lost Cause nonsense.
I recall hearing that 1500 historians worked on this film. I'm not sure what they did.. but "work" is not the word for it.