Finally got to see Cold Mountain at the Coex last night. A fine film, to say the least. I have to confess, however, that the film’s opening scene — the Battle of the Crater during the siege of Petersburg — was, as a Yankee, rather difficult to sit through. I mean, you’re watching the Blue charge, thinking to yourself, “Don’t run into the damn crater. Don’t run into the damn crater. It’ll be all right, if you just don’t run into the damn crater!” But it’s kind like watching a passion play — no matter how many times you tell Jesus, “Run away! The Romans are coming,” he never does. And as certain as you know know the sun will rise in the morning, you know that soon enough, the entire IX Corps is going to end up trapped at the bottom of that crater while Johnny Reb turns what was — if I may say so myself — a rather nifty piece of Yankee ingenuity into a turkey shoot; the kind of defeat only the Army of the Potomac could engineer. As one reviewer of the film put it:
The film opens with the battle of Petersburg; an intense confrontation that found northern soldiers planning a sneak attack on their southern enemies, only to be caught in their own trap, leaving the southern troops free reign to kill at will. Minghella, not known for his knack with action sequences, creates a portrait of claustrophobia and mass death that burns in the back of the brain, taking the audience headfirst into the conflict and bathing it in John Seale’s grimly beautiful photographic sheen.
Or how about this:
The most outstanding scene was in the beginning just after the Union army blew a monstrous hole in the Confederate trench lines. All the Union soldiers rose-up and charged through the falling dirt and debris only to run smack into a huge crater wall. Thousands of soldiers were trapped and began piling up like Holocaust victims in a gas chamber gasping for air. The camera craned overhead and the remaining Confederates appear over the wall’s edge and began to slaughter the desperate soldiers. The Union army was massacred in a scene that puts Saving Private Ryan’s Normandy invasion to shame. Absolutely gut-wrenching!.
I almost felt sick as the boys in gray started rolling the cannons to the edge of the crater, and you look down and see this mass of humanity — all wearing blue — packed in like sardines in a trap of their own making. Horrifying.
I gather our Southern brothers get the same feeling right before watching re-enactments of Pickett’s Charge.
19 Comments
I guess I should point out that Petersburg is the town of my birth. I should also point out that it is a hole almost as bad as Dongducheon.
You are right about the Pickett’s Charge thing. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the second have of that Gettysburg movie.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we lost so we can be members of our fine republic. I just don’t like seeing my ancestors getting laid low.
i love the Hollywood left. this movie takes a swipe at racism, the south, and the military all at once. it portrays the south as bigots when it was a fight for states rights and it celebrates a guy that deserts his unit in a time of war.
what’s not to love about this movie if you are a lefty. that’s why it got nominated for oscars regardless of the piss poor acting.
I think I’ve mentioned this to you, Andy — it’s kind of hard to be a Yankee Civil War buff. I mean, out West it’s OK, but the East… If, in all human history, there was another army that got beaten as often and as badly as the Army of the Potomac, I’d be hard pressed to name it. Although, I guess I should credit it with being possibly the only army in the world that could have survived both Bull Runs, Chancellorsville, Cold Harbor, etc. and still win the war.
The thing that makes the Crater so damn frustrating — aside from the fact that over 5,000 Federals ended up getting slaughtered — was that it started out so well. We Yankees are a crafty people — see the mine. We’re just not a martial people — see what transpired after the mine. And can someone please tell me what the hell Burnside was doing commanding troops at that stage of the war? Don’t get me wrong, Burnside was a likeable guy and all, and he was pretty upfront about being an incompetant ass — he would have been the first to tell you he had no business anywhere near a live battlefield. Only decent work he did during the war was weeding out Copperheads in Ohio.
To be fair, Meade was equally, if not more, responsible for what happened in the Crater. The AoP deserved much better than the generals who lead it.
I don’t know if either of you guys have ever made it out to Gettysburg, but moving along the lines of the three days of battle is pretty powerful stuff no matter which side your ancestors were on. Looking down from Little Round Top and seeing the slope the 20th Maine charged down really brought the bayonet charge to life.
Veterans, regiments, and historical societies commissioned monuments for the park, and you can tell that it’s only really Virginia out of all the Confederate states that has seen fit to put in a lot of monuments.
i agree that the opening battle sequence was quite powerful, which made the next decidedly average 2 plus hours of filmmaking so disappointing.
for a film that is so long, one has to wonder why the romance element is so rushed. reminiscent of the adaptation of captain corelli’s mandolin, some directors seem to now assume that if they cast two attractive leads, an audience will not question them falling in love. hey, they’re hot and everyone, generally speaking…is not hot - of course they’re in love! if minghella spent better time making us believe the romance, then an audience would have been more invested in the rest of the film.
also, for a movie that is set during the civil war (and, again, is so long), you’d expect the filmmakers to, perhaps, comment on the civil war. unfortunately, it does not appear that they have any interest in it. the film is at heart a (very under-cooked) love story and the setting - a gruesome war that eventually served such an insignificant purpose as freeing black people - is only used to provide dramatic obstacles for what the filmmakers believe is really interesting - one good looking person trying to get home so he can be with another good looking person whom he hardly knows.
one has to also question the logic behind using such a amoral character such as the one played by philip seymore hoffman as comic relief. again, minghella moves from set piece to pseudo-important setpiece without any united, over-arching purpose besides the simplistic generalizations of “war is bad” and “slavery is bad,” or even “raping women while putting their sick baby on the ground is bad.”
i don’t want to make it seem like this is the worst movie ever made. hardly - i found it for the most part to be entertaining, in a fluffy way. i just find harvey weinstein blaming of everything to the abreviated screener ban to the early oscar date to the fact that they shot the film in the balkans for the film (and miramax) not getting a best picture nomination extremely off-putting. maybe, just maybe…the film wasn’t that great?
not that this seemed to matter before…
Sorry, Kevin, but I rather liked it.
It’s more of an old-school odyssey or tale of a Hero than anything else. Like pretty much every old story about a hero (aside, oddly enough, from the Odyssey), the hero in question goes through much suffering and change, encounters and overcomes hardship, achieves what he sets out to do… and dies defending his cause in the end.
In a way, aside from the dying part, it’s really more of a story of two heroes… albeit it from different backgrounds and facing different challenges. The only difference is, obviously, that the female hero doesn’t die but serves as a source of hope. Changed by her ordeals, she comes out stronger than before and carries on the name of the man who accomplished so much only to die defending her and his home.
Aside from minor nit-picky details (such as Federal recruits having to try so hard to find food–I’m sorry, but when it came to finding sustenance, the Union army might as well have been a swarm of locusts when it hit the South. ‘Course, they did have some problem with Southern flora, such as oleanders… but a few fatalities leads the rest of them to be even more quick on the draw), the movie was well-done and true to its times. The filmmakers didn’t try to make things look better than they were, and they approached ugly issues head-on without trying to make them seem less than they were.
I thought it was pretty good, if rather sad. My G/F absolutely despised it, though, because of the almost constant oppressive nature of the movie’s atmosphere.
Oh, and though I knew nothing at the time about the history of that battle, I was proud to realize, after the fact, that I had predicted the result of the Battle of the Crater. I didn’t expect such a humongous hole, but I figured they’d cut a breach into the Rebel line and attempt to funnel themselves through it, thus creating a kill-zone. To my surprise, it was far more extreme than I had expected. I still can’t believe that the Union approach to warfare was “throw Generals at them till we find one that works.” If General Lee hadn’t sided with his home state and denied President Lincoln’s offer to lead the Union army, the Civil War probably wouldn’t have lasted past the first two years. Sobering stuff.
Often overlooked in accounts of the Battle of the Crater is the fact that a division of black troops under Brig. Gen. Edward Ferrero had specifically been trained and briefed for the mission. They had been warned to, ya’ know, watch out for the freakin’ huge hole. Gen. Meade countermanded Burnside at the last minute and ordered him to lead the assault with two divisions of regulars, who hadn’t really been told the plan. After they had charged, leaderless, into the crater, Burnside made the situation worse by sending Ferrero’s men in. They took the objective, Cemetary Hill, but with their reinforcements stuck in the hole they were forced back, ending up in the crater themselves.
BTW, also a Petersburg native. Apparently we’re everywhere.
it’s fine to like it (as i said, i enjoyed it for the most part as well), ancorenalpha, but it’s becoming quite a problem when we call films like cold mountain “great” or “important” (i’m not saying you did, but others have) because really, the film is about nothing. it’s a hollywood pseudo-epic of a love story set during a time which will provide for costumes, wide vistas, accents, and other elements of production that disturbingly seem to be being equated with “greatness.”
with some slight exceptions (the natalie portman cameo spings to mind), the film is never shaded with any sense of grey. it’s black and white, going as far as to make the arch-villains be physically unattractive and albino sorts who apparently have no conscience whatsoever. they are bad simply because they are, and exist to provide dramatic obstacles for the hero and heroine. given that inman is a the hero of the story while also being a confederate soldier, you would think this would be a nice opportunity for the filmmakers to sketch out some of the aforementioned grey area. nope. the politics of the civil war, issues of race, slavery, et cetera are eschewed in favor of the forelorn looks of seperated lovers as they peer off at picturesque vistas.
there is no reality in the film, only hollywood. the good guys are really good, the bad guys really bad, the sex scenes through the hazy photogenic filter of a romantic campfire, the occasional comic relief of a attempted slave murdering preacher, the foretune-telling well, and an ending that is foreordained from ten minutes in. the battle sequence discussed in the marmot’s piece is so powerful precisely because it feels real, an element that is decidedly lacking from so much that follows.
I woould like to see a movie in which the South wins. Just for a change.
OK, I’m going to wait for the video. I only go to the movies 4-5 times a year and I usually save it for ‘epic’ films like “LOTR” and the upcoming “Alamo.” Romance shows up just as well on the small screen.
The thing about showing multi-dimensional characters who embrace evil is that it is very difficult to show the process of that embrace without either losing empathy (for the protagonist) or misplacing empathy (for the antagonist). One of the few movies that I have seen do that well is Menace II Society and that took the entire film.
Kevin, that’s just fine. I see the problem–you expect it do something, and you expect it before you even see the film.
What you described is actually a standard formula used by Hollywood. It’s ’standard’ because it works. Indeed, they didn’t go TOO deep into many of the issues that I would classify as “moral quagmires” simply because of the fact that they didn’t want the movie to be controversial or draw bad press. They weren’t trying to alter people’s views, just tell a story.
I have seen many movies and read many books. I can agree with people who say that the book is almost always better than the movie. In that case, I’d advise you to look for the book, which was written a LONG time ago, and read it. If you really ARE interested in the details you brought up, perhaps you can find the answers for them there.
RickyVandal, there’s a LOT of books with that topic. Try looking around. Turtledove did a pretty good one with “Guns of the South”, which later branched off into an entire “alternate universe history” of what happens after, all the way up to the World Wars. Of course, in his, the South wins because of a rather sci-fi intrusion (the Southern generals are offered a batch of AK-47’s by a temporally displaced weapons-dealer), but aside from that little glaring bit (as if they couldn’t have one at the first battle of Bull Run and moved on the Washington from there, etc) it’s pretty good and interesting stuff.
Most writers (and readers, such as myself) agree that having the South win is generally a “Bad Thing” with unfortunate effects for the country and other parts of the world, since the United States wouldn’t have been a united nation during the two world wars.
ancorenalpha, i work in the film industry, so i didn’t really expect cold mountain do be anything other than painfully mediocre, which it ultimately was. in my opinion, formula and artistic decisions dictated by “not wanting to draw bad press” or not wishing to “alter people’s views” does not a great movie make.
again, you can spend your time much worse than seeing cold mountain. but when we start calling formulaic hollywood fluff like this to be a great film, then we’ve really lost sight of what great films really are.
I agree, Kevin, and I think I see why we’re butting heads here. Personally, I never claimed it to be great. Very good, yes, but not great. Apparently others think it is great, and you disagree with them. That’s fine. I see the film as being above the level of mediocre, however, and I guess in this case we’ll have to disagree. It was a refreshing change, though nothing revolutionary.
didn’t mean to single you out, ancorenalpha. there was just quite a few things in cold mountain (the ensuing oscar publicity push) that rubbed me the wrong way. we’re all entitled to our opinions, however. my aplogies for perhaps reading things into your posts that were not there.
No prob, Kev. In fact, reading my own posts, I realize I sounded like an ass in a couple of them. Sorry about that. Yeah, I don’t think this movie was deserving of any major awards, but it was a worthwhile film to see, unlike many others which crowd the theaters.
Singling me out is alright… I was the only one replying to your posts directly and repeatedly. Makes sense you’d reply back.
Speaking of Civil War era films, what did you think about Gods and Generals?
never saw gods and generals - i try to avoid films involving ted turner and exorbitant running times. the terrible reviews were not encouraging, either.
Indeed. You can’t go letting CRITICS making your decisions for you. Sheesh. Besides, they’re generally wrong anyway. The more critics bash a movie, the more encouragement I have to go and see it. They’re called “critics” for a reason.
The running time was long, indeed, but it was worth it. That’s why they also included an old-school “Intermission” in the middle of the showing.
It was a good movie, and it portrayed many aspects of the war and many battles quite well. If you’re in any way into military history, it’s interesting to see how the military was evolving at that point… you can even see where certain modern traditions evolved.
you damnd yanks dont know shit well i guess if i almost got whipped by a bounch of starved half dead farmers from the south ide be in denile to
we did the right thing at the crater and at andersonville kill as many as you can before they kill you. The South Was Right God bless Dixie And The Confederacy