Wicked Spring

Wicked Spring is like a beautiful blonde that you see across a crowded room. She looks great, everything is in the right place. You decide to approach, and as you get near you begin to see the flaws carefully hidden beneath the make up. Still she is very attractive up close. But then... She opens her mouth to speak. And you discover she is a total vacuum with absolutely nothing to say. Instantly, you wish you were somewhere else talking to anybody but her. Wicked Spring looks good on the surface. High marks for period set design and wardrobe. But then you realized this writer/director is more impressed with surface gloss than any real substance or depth. I agree with one of the other comments that said Wicked Spring would have been better with some severe editing, turning it into a short. At a more abbreviated length it might stand up a bit better as one could overlook the lack of character development and lack of any meaningful drama.

This film might be described as a non-existent drama. First, we are subject to a long non verbal montage of the soldiers and their wife's/lovers before the war. Without the benefit of completely developed scenes in this prologue, we do not really get a chance to "feel" for the women and the men that must soon leave them. The lack of feeling for the characters leaves their interactions flat and lifeless. The war part of the movie makes up a majority of this film. Throughout most of it we witness the Battle of the Wilderness with a non existent story line. Soldiers from both sides attempt to slaughter each other and we are supposed to "feel" something for them. Unfortunately, because we did not get to know and understand them in the beginning, and now war scenes have taken the place of character development, their is little compassion that we can have for such two dimensional characters. Throughout we never manage to have a "stake" in the character's lives. We never care for them, because we never really get to know them. So, by the end of the movie whatever happens to them becomes meaningless and inconsequential. This could have been a good film. But, like most of what Hollywood is offering as of late, this independent tries to cover up an incredibly weak story with visuals that they hope will both impress and camouflage. It doesn't work. This film was doomed from the start because of a lack of a good script.

"Wicked Spring" is a very ordinary low budget indie which plays out like a slice of Civil War life as men from both sides spend time together during a respite in the Battle of the Wilderness. This plotless film is put together with relatively unknown actors delivering mediocre performances; lots of reenactment battle scenes which give no sense of generaling and strategy; and a big dose of visuals to make up for the absence of content and story arc; etc. I'm a Civil War buff of sorts and have seen just about everything from Ken Burns CW to Glory to the Gettysburgs to the Civil War Journal, Red Badge of Courage, North vs South, etc., etc. and, though I think I understand what Hershberger was trying to do with this movie, it just didn't work for me. Keep expectations real and make this the last CW movie you watch. (C)

Plot less and inane. This incredibly boring movie made Gods and Generals look like an action flick. It seems the writer/director really doesn't have much to say about the Civil War experience. What little story there is could have been told in a fifteen minute short. Filming a few re-enactors shooting at each other in the woods is not much of a plot. On top of this the lead characters are flat and uninspired. What is also of interest is the fact that in the making of video the filmmakers emphasize the historical accuracy of the movie. I counted at least 9 major errors, the most glaring is the totally out of date train. If you claim historical accuracy you best deliver.

"Wicked Spring" is a love story, left unfulfilled, between a Civil War Soldier and his sweetheart back home. The film opens up with timely folk music and long, simmering shots that pull the viewer back to a time long ago, with no fast moving cars, just trains. The relationship, which seems dreamlike in comparison to the war, is drawn out with no words, almost smearing like chalk pastels.

Once the first words are spoken however, the film does not get much more interesting than that. The first monologue, the girlfriend of Harrison, the benevolent gentleman soldier, is poor in quality. The words seem forced and badly chosen. In fact, most of the dialogue in the film is of this same quality, distracting from attempt to evoke emotion from the viewer.

The shots of the war before morning are very grey and uninteresting. The lack of color seems obviously symbolic of the deprivation, the hunger, the death, the lost love, but it is not done well, and lacks a visual alertness that the film really requires. The sound in they grey scenes is extremely repetitive and contains a rolling bass that is supposed to be like continual gunshot, however seems more like a rumbling stomach. That could have been my own stomach though, starving for content.

If the film was in fact more visually interesting, than its main stream love story plot would be more forgivable. While the emphasis is obviously on the ordinary man, the plot is left much too ordinary to really embrace. A stronger character begins to become defined when the illiteracy of Harrison becomes apparent. However, this is not a focus of the film until after an hour of heaping mounds of grey fighting scenes that could have been done without. I think that the director should have spent more time working on the basic elements of plot and composition before getting carried away with knit-picky things like the historical correctness of the costuming. This film will probably not stand long in the wake of time.