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.

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?

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.

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.

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.