It is understood that the American Civil War was a series of complex and pressing events that can cause one to devote their life to researching and studying, yet never come closer to fully understanding it. That in mind no series, how well funded or produced, could ever do the war true justice in both scope and scale or in accurately portraying the men who fought it. However most good studios and projects will do as much research as possible to ensure their information and their portrayal of the war is as accurate as possible America Heroes Channel and Cream Productions do not know what research is.
The focus of my scorn comes from the complete and utter lack of authentic recreations of the war. While their narrative may contain some positive points and usefully intriguing information, the show would have done so much better with a slide show of period photographs much in the vein of Ken Burns the Civil War
What this company put to film resembles nothing of the American Civil War. It is outright a travesty. I could fill this very page with more criticisms to the inaccuracies seen in just the first episode and their 360 shoot combined. There are more details wrong than ever right. The old phrase the Devils in the Details was meant for this.
Many of you would ask "why does it matter if their uniforms or accurate, it looked cool!" While having museum grade quality uniforms is exciting and accurate it is also very expensive and understandably so when film companies look for a step below. The uniforms here are not a step below, they are floors. The confederate uniforms for one resemble NOTHING ever worn by a Southern soldier. They are fictions. The Federal soldiers headware is again so disappointing as to resemble a block than a kepi or forage cap. As someone who has worked in the Historical film industry and had to work with very low budget pictures, it is still obtainable for us to have uniforms that resemble at the least what the real Mccoy did.
The tactics are abysmal. They actually just lack tactics . The entire film resembles a bunch of men playing paintball in the woods. This production would have you believe the soldiers of the American Civil War ran around the woods in small clusters hiding behind rocks and trees, then dashing off in a wild charge at the enemy. False. It actually is a disservice. The American Civil War was known for its nearly static battle lines drawn out in brigade fashion that slugged it out within a few hundred yards. And when they did close within a hundred yards the result was devastating. Having background extras to work with is difficult, again I know from personal experience. But having an actual adviser on set makes all the difference. How can you make a dozen men look like 300 in a battle line? Good film making. Good editing. A DP who knows how to shoot around their limitations. Clearly this production had none of those.
Again to close, why does it matter? Why does it matter that we need authentic representation of uniforms, equipment and materials. Because this show pitched the idea of using recreation scenes of battle. They chose the medium. Cream Productions and AHC could have picked talking heads and slide shows of original images with graphics of moving battle lines. But they wanted to be edgy so they chose battle scenes. So now they pay that price. Look at the other reviews, the stars given. We are all upset. Cream Productions has been blocking users and deleting comments because of the flood of negative responses they've received.
This is our history, do not take it for granted and think you can deliver a cheap, researchless project.
