Men Go to Battle

What is happening on a lot of the reviews posted on the IMDb site is that the reviewer must have an interest be that financial or simply they know the actors, writers, producers, etc. What ends up happening is when we (a typical IMDb user) check the reviews on little known movies, we end up getting a load of BS and personal bias.

Let me set the record straight on this movie for anyone looking for a honest personal review. This is maybe the worst movie made in the last couple of years. There is no story, the acting is pathetic, it's way too long, way to slow, there is absolutely no reason to watch this garbage. Your life cannot be so completely void that you need to bring this trite into it. To say this movie is a complete and total waste of time would actually be understating it. I'm sick and tired of being misled by brain dead reviewers. The bottom line is avoid this movie, do NOT waste your precious time or money on this crap, even with your finger on the fast forward button, it won't make this one go away soon enough. Just in case you didn't quite get the message....I HATED THIS MOVIE AND EVERYTHING ABOUT IT INCLUDING THOSE REVIEWERS WHO RECOMMENDED IT.

Not only the best 'indie' I've ever seen -- by FAR -- but one of the best historical movies I've ever seen. For an hour and a half I really felt like I'd wandered around rural America during the Civil War.

As the previous reviewer commented, this is a movie about textures, not plot. The dialogue is spare, very spare; the accents feel authentic, so much so that there are moments when it's hard to make out what they're saying -- but it doesn't matter. Plot points, such as they are, don't come out in dialogue as much as through the flow of images. Nobody talks about relationships -- they don't talk much at all, which feels 'right' for the place and time -- rather, we sense the relationships through how people look at each other, how they react, wordlessly, to each other's behavior.

The casting is excellent, too. With one minor exception, all the people in the film feel like figures from that era. This is a very hard thing to achieve, you really have to work hard to find actors who don't have that contemporary energy -- but they pulled it off.

It's involving, it's seductive in how it reels you in, it's just all-around impressive as hell.

One bit of advice: if at all possible, do not wait for this to appear on DVD or streaming video. GO SEE IT in a theater, it will be a much better experience.

Honestly, I haven't been this impressed with something in ages.

I found this movie in a section on Netflix called award winning movies and after viewing the movie I figured it must of been a participation ribbon. The characters were so poorly portrayed that you could not make connection to them or care about what happens to them. The acting was wooden and tiresome, the plot poorly executed. Not a good effort and not worth watching.

It's difficult to comprehend what it is some reviewers saw in this film. I see some of them saying it was like looking through a window into another time, and I suppose there may be some truth to that. But imagine someone looking through a window into your life on a random, drab, uneventful day, and how bored they would be watching you go through your daily routine. That is essentially this film.

Except it is worse than that. The characters rarely speak, and when they do it is never meaningful, just the stuttering utterances of awkward, unintelligent men as they stumble through the mundane events of their rural lives. There is virtually no emotion in any of the characters: they are all drab, dour, and boring. Emotional characters whose motivations and desires are clear and relatable can sometimes draw us into something even if it lacks a compelling plot, but this film has neither. Not only does it lack a compelling plot, it lacks any plot at all. There is no pacing to the story: no rise, no fall, no drama. The film even managed to make a civil war battle seem drab and boring. The character who goes to war is not animated even when life and death hang in the balance. He shows no fear, no passion, none of the hatred for the enemy that men summon to compel them to kill before their foes kill their friend and themselves. He seems to have a friend who reads and writes letters for him, but we do not see whether his friend falls in battle, and he certainly never looks for him.

Understated is not always bad, but this film stretches it to unstated. The film has nothing to say, nothing to show us, and absolutely no point. I simply cannot imagine how anyone would come away from this experience not feeling like they were robbed of their time. If not for the anticipation of hoping that something might happen (nothing does), I could have had the same experience watching paint dry, and would have come away no less emotionally or intellectually satisfied.

As a final note, the title of this film feels quite inappropriate. There is no conflict in the film to which that assertion applies, and if it is merely a statement of what the film is supposed to be about, it is also incorrect. If they're just trying to tell us what's going to happen (almost nothing), it should rightly be "A Man Goes to a Battle, While Another Does Not" and neither has any clear reason or motivation for doing or not doing these things. I thought perhaps toward the end there might be a conflict, the brother who stayed resenting the brother who left for abandoning him, and the brother who left thinking the brother who stayed a coward, or something, and perhaps telling him that "Men Go to Battle" as a challenge to his manhood. Alas, conflict would require emotion, and both conflict and emotion seem utterly beyond the abilities or intentions of the filmmakers. Instead the characters simply plod along, and the paint slowly dries.

If you want to know what average people looked like during the Civil War...and didn't want to bother following someone smart, or rich or witty, this movie is for you. You will give it 10 stars.

If you want to see action, you won't like this movie. If you want to see the usual beauties that Hollywood throws at us in every role, you won't like this movie. If you want to see plot, you will HATE this movie.

It felt like someone took Napoleon Dynamite and dropped him into the Civil War era, without any of the laughs.