Three-and-three-quarter-hour Civil War epic from Ronald F. Maxwell, writer and director also of Gettysburg: eight hours all told. Although it was made ten years later, and although the action takes place earlier, many of the same actors have been retained in the same roles (e.g., Jeff Daniels, C. Thomas Howell, Kevin Conway), while one reappearing actor, Stephen Lang, has been shifted from one key role to another, Gen. Pickett to Gen. Jackson. (Robert Duvall takes over from Martin Sheen in the role of Robert E. Lee, established here as a significant figure in the history of the comb-over.) The prequel is differently, if not quite equally, good. Chief among its differences are the broader scope of its action (an Odyssey to the Iliad of the earlier epic); the solider groundwork, going back to the fundamentals of the Southern secession and the defection of Lee from the U.S. Army; the far-ranging refresher course on a number of those military milestones you've forgotten from your high-school American History (Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville); and above all, the unprecedented fleshing-out of a familiar name, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who becomes not just a real and a tangible and a feeling human being, but a gallant and admirable one, profoundly religious, fatalistic, self-effacing (always insisting that his nickname belonged to his brigade and not to himself alone), a devoted husband, a yearning and unfulfilled father, an implacable warrior: a hero of a kind who seems conceivable only in olden days. Before television, before Freud, before God died. The plainness, the starchiness, the Spartanism of the presentation afford a sensible balance between the austere academicism of Rossellini's historical films and the stately pageantry of John Ford's. If it is lacking a little in personality, it is also lacking in ego and self-regard. It is not, on the other hand, lacking in respect -- either for its subject or for its audience. And the amount of the script given over to speeches, prayers, literary excerpts, and famous quotations creates an almost Augustan air that goes well with the movie's gravity of purpose, its loftiness of ambition. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd