Great acting, good dialogue and a fascinating story, help this movie rise above its major faults.
This movie tells the story of a fascinating time in our history. While this movie can often play more as a history lesson than many would want it to, it is a very interesting and enjoyable history lesson. None of this movie's faults can overcome the fact that the story it tells is so compelling. For a movie about real life people who have become larger than life figures, it is important to have great actors portraying them. This movie's all star cast does a fantastic job becoming these historical figures. Despite these actors being so familiar to movie goers, while watching the film, one forgets they are watching actors and not the real people. This is heightened by the fact they are often given great dialogue. It would be so easy for the dialogue to have been too on the nose and forced. This never happens and the words seem to come directly from the characters. Some of the dialogue is also very funny, given some great levity to what could have been an overly serious film. /
The fact that the true story is so fascinating is both the greatest strength and fault of this movie. There is often too much going on for this movie's running time. Because of this the film is constantly moving from one interesting story to the next with little time to breath or slow down and get to know the characters. The film often seems to rush over certain events to make room for others and even those aren't given the time they full deserve. This film should have either been a longer movie or a TV series to tell all that should have been told. Another major fault of this movie is that the camera simply seems restless and unable to stand still for more than a few seconds. This may sound like a small complaint but it was often overly distracting and rather annoying. To be honest I found it less annoying towards the end of the movie when I finally got somewhat used to it, but that doesn't make up for how much in distracted me for the rest of this movie. For such a dialogue heavy film with little action this feels like an odd choice that has the affect of alienating the audience.
Still even with these major faults, I found the good certainly outweighed the bad and I had a good time.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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