Wicked Spring

First and foremost is the story. No matter what kind of special effects or horrific battle scenes you toss in, you've got to have a story. This film lacks even the rudiments of a good story. This film is so plotless that it makes it difficult to criticize. Its hard to discuss something that isn't there! In other words, the plot is so very simplistic as to be non existent. It seems that the director was so dazzled by the cinematography, so wrapped up in capturing the boys in blue and gray, that he utterly failed to bother with plot or character development. What you end up with is a "pretty" film with no substance. The movie equivalent of a beautiful blonde with the intelligence of a gnat. Unfortunately even this glossy initial appearance fades quickly as well. The battle scenes are pedestrian and unrewarding. Attempts to use sound design to fool the viewer into thinking there are a lot more soldiers than what we see on screen, fail abysmally. And the failure of the director to actually take the viewer into the battle, leaves you with an unemotional "third person" documentary feel. So what you get after looking past the apparent glitz and glamour of this Civil War movie, is a very weak, overly simplistic, lackluster montage of battle scenes.

"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.

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.

I saw this one in the video store just the other day. Being a huge Civil War buff I just had to pick it up. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a big disappointment. I see, by many of the other comments written here, that I am not alone in seeing the primary (huge!) fault in this movie. It doesn't have a plot or a story! Are we supposed to "ooooh!" and "aaaaah" over beautiful scenes of actors and reenactors dressed up in authentic uniforms? Are we supposed to look at the pretty packaging and not notice that this film doesn't really have any depth? The whole story (and I use that term loosely!) can be distilled into one sentence. Soldiers in the war were once civilians with lives all their own, and soldiers in that war die. I've seen more depth to the subject in a children's book. All in all, not very good

"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)