Metacritic reviews

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.

Gods and Generals is American history transformed into a museum movie, consistently making the flawed human characters at the heart of the Civil War into flawless figures Olympian in their statuesque remoteness.

The kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

Bloodless and false.

A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.

What the filmmakers fail to recognize is that history on the page is quite different from what it needs to be onscreen, namely alive and visceral.

It's a plodding, episodic film, reverent and sanctimonious, and its pro-Southern viewpoint -- a time-honored Hollywood tendency -- makes "Gone With the Wind" look like a Northern polemic.

The film's staggering incompetence can be measured by the way it makes some of the most fascinating and heart-rending episodes in American history tedious.

It comes off like so much poppycock -– to use the vernacular of the day.