| Overall Grade: |
D |
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| Story: |
C+ |
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| Acting: |
D+ |
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| Direction: |
D |
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|
| Visuals: |
C |
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Good Idea, badly developed
by Catherine d'Bajor (movies profile)
Aug 26, 2006
2
of
3 people found this review helpful
As a fan of alternative history stories and a student of American history, I was excited by the premise of this film.
I was disappointed by the result.
Perhaps my knowledge of history is too great to allow me to enoy "CSA", but the errors and incorrect assumptions were just too great for me to get past and "believe" the premise the film was based on. It can be done. In books like "the Guns of the South" by Turtledove and others, I have derived a great deal of pleasure from the premise of a Confederate victory in the "War of Northern Aggression", but this film failed utterly to draw me in.
There were some cute and well-done moments. I loved the interview, set in the early 20th Century, with an elderly, embittered but unrepentatnt Licoln in exile in Canada. And some of the commercials (remember that you are supposedly watching a British Made Documentary film being aired on the Confederate Broadcasting System.) were frightenly realistic. Others, on the other hand, were badly conceived and poorly executed. Historic footage and photographs were sylishly used and cleverly altered (ala "Forrest Gump") to allow historical personalities to address issues that they never actually had to be concerned with. But, I was put off by the use of famous and/or well known photographs that were blatantly mis-labled. Photos of Richmond and Savannah following thier fall to Federal troops, labled as New York and Boston, were just too obvious to be used. Surely less well-known images could have been found that would have conveyed the same idea.
And, ultimately, the direction was too ham-handed and brutal. I got tired of being beaten over the head with the notion that a Confederate nation would have been unremittingly evil, a nation-state reflecting the values of the Ku-Klux-Klan.
More subtlety and more appreciation of the differences between the imagined Confederacy Triumphant and the Union Realized might have served the makers of the film better.
The film was only marginally entertaining and was not at all imformative. It's imaginative concept was flawed in it's execution. All-in-all, don't waste your money. |
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