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| Still from Men Go to Battle |
Men Go to Battle
August 19, 2016 | by Benjamin Nugent
A small-budget film dramatizes the passive motives of Civil War enlistees.
Men Go to Battle, currently playing in a small number of theaters, is unusual among Civil War movies in that it dares to dramatize the established truth that the war was fought largely by people who harbored no particular ideology whatsoever. Civil War movies are typically about people like Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln), Robert Gould Shaw (Glory), Robert E. Lee (Gettysburg), the founders of the Ku Klux Klan (Birth of a Nation), and principled Southern defectors (this summer’s pedantic Free State of Jones), that is, people who cherish strong beliefs of one kind or another and take a stand. Henry Mellon stands for nothing. But he fights in the Battle of Perryville, at once panicked and sleepy-eyed, marching into artillery fire, shooting his rifle at Braxton Bragg’s line of gray, which must be somewhere out there on the far side of the cloudy explosions...Read the full article here.
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