Who cast this thing?
Martin Sheen is a believable but scenery chewing Robert E Lee. Watching Tom Berenger as James Longstreet, his beard clearly glued on, we can't stop seeing Jake Taylor or Sgt. Barnes. C. His Longstreet has no base. Thomas Howell (WTF?) is not up to his role. Richard Jordan plays an interesting Lowell Armitage. Stephen Lang excels as the rakish Picket. The next year he would excel as the drunk, lethal and cowardly Ike Clanton in Tombstone. The man can act.
At first we didn't like Jeff Daniels as Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, but the performance quickly won us over. Daniels plays Chamberlain as a normal man, tired and weary, just trying to get by. It's a near Oscar worthy performance. Oscar Adjacent? In 1994 he'd star in Dumb and Dumber. What's up with that?
Aside from the casting, hampering a these actors is the dialogue. Good lord, Laurence effing Olivier couldn't do anything with some of these lines. We understand that in 1860 the educated classes liked their rhetoric and spoke with dramatic flourish unknown today. Still, Ron Maxwell the director needed to tell Ron Maxwell the writer to tone it down a bit. By the many arms of Vishnu and the Lords of Kobol, speeches, bloody speeches.
Wish they would of toned down the general parts and show some enlisted men on the Southern side to me it woof been more interesting exploring why the average white southern was fighting
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