Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I have been a volunteer living historian at Antietam National Battlefield for over 5 years. I personally know most of the historians that were interviewed for the Antietam episode. Their segments are great. The rest of the production is a historical disgrace. Others have gone into detail about the many inaccuracies, so I won't cover those in this review. What I will say is that those inaccuracies are not the result of a low budget, but rather laziness or downright willful ignorance. It doesn't cost money to look at period photos and drill manuals on the Internet and see what your soldiers should look like and how they should handle a rifle and a cannon. The lack of research for the battle scenes in this production is a disgrace and it is a slap in the face to the historians that were interviewed and to the soldiers who fought and died at Antietam. Shame on you, AHC. You are disrespecting the American Heroes you claim to care so much about.

Remember that Conan OBrian skit where he goes to an old time baseball game? The people there were pretending it was the late 1860's and played baseball using vintage uniforms, bats, rules and the like? When they found the guy with the granola bars in his pocket? I thought this "show" was an extension of that skit until I realized they were serious. Sad thing is, that skit was so well done while this was absolute garbage. Bad acting, bad production, unrealistic action, uniforms, accouterments and details. I counted THREE separate moments where I saw modern water bottles on screen. Not even trying to hide them. The uniforms looked like something the local high school got from the Goodwill. If you have to watch it, stab your eyes or so you save yourself the horror. A lifetime of blindness is preferable.

..this show sucks, but so do the reviewers on this site, Sovereign Citizens one and all don't let the patriots lie to you americas civil war was 100% about the States Right to keep other human beings as slave labour and then to count those slaves as population for purposes of Representation in the House, even when those slaves had no Rights to be Represented look at the Secession documents ALL OF THEM cite the free state/slave state "problem" as the reason for Secession Robert E Lee was a traitor who should have been hanged the South had no black soldiers except those that served under duress "freeing" the slaves wasn't done until 1864 in order to prevent the wholesale slaughter of blacks in the SOuth how many black Union soldiers were EVER taken prisoner? NONE. because the racist Southerners killed them all as they often said they would read a book not written in the South, where people only teach northern aggression but they don't teach WHY slavery WAS/IS WRONG because Southerners think owning slaves is a CHOICE

As someone with family members who served—and died—on both sides during the Civil War, I regret that this production has done more to make "those people back then" seem even more remote to the modern viewer. Even the layman can tell that there's something hokey about how the soldiers are portrayed, in their actions and equipment. There were thousands upon thousands of photographs taken in studios and in the field from 1861 to 1865. Play a simple game of "one of these things is not like the other" and compare them to this show. One might say " well, the average person doesn't know," and this is a faulty excuse. For one, the purpose of a documentary is to inform. Second, they may not be able to articulate just WHAT is wrong, but there is a subliminal aesthetic on which anyone can pick up. Take a simple uniform cap. During the war, the brims were made of a varnished, stiff leather that can look quite fetching when worn with purpose. You see a photo of a soldier from 155 years ago wearing one, and you can connect with him. You think "this guy had a personality. He was real." Now get a cheap, costume-grade replica that is finished with a soft, pleather brim that looks rather sad and creased like a baseball cap, plopped on the head of an actor. The actor looks weird, because he treats it as a costume, and presumes that "well, this probably looked good to those old-fashioned people." It is all disingenuous because it, itself, is wrong and is being worn with ignorance. This stuff is more important, and detectable, than many realize. For me, part of making "them" feel less different from "us" is to just represent them as they would have looked and acted, not a contrived farce that seems to presume that history, left as it was, is too "boring" for modern audiences. Put it this way: you can't expect to create an accurate-looking Civil War scene from scratch by renting costumes and weapons, handing them out, and saying "action." You, literally, need to build an army unit. The background in "Cold Mountain" went through a "camp of instruction" to bring them up to a basic level of proficiency. I'm not saying that reenactors are God's gift to history, but at least there's a core, basic knowledge there. You start with that, and bring in a military coordinator/adviser to smooth out the few individual quirks and "reenactorisms," and go from there. I've seen viewers who are afraid of this production being "one-sided" (i.e. acknowledging that the North won the war) but I assure you that both sides in this are equally sullied with plastic water bottles and flag poles that look to have been taken from the church auditorium.