I just got done reading today in This Week about a Kevin Willmott (sp?) movie due to come out sometime in the near future about a world where the CSA wins the Civil War. At first, I was excited that it would be based on the Turtledove novels, but was horrified as I read the article and found out what a travesty this man was making the movie into.
Firstly, there are a number of discrepencies that tell me his attitude toward the causes of the Civil War are grossly infantile, namely, that he believes it was ENTIRELY about race. His "modern" CSA has such wonderful commodities as "shackles", an electronic collar used to keep slaves in line, the "Home Slave Shopping Network", and "Darkie Toothpaste". This points to a CSA where slavery remained the primary economic commodity when in fact, leading up to the Civil War, slavery was beginning to go out of fashion. By 1900, slavery would have been de facto abolished if not legally so, so a modern CSA where so much is built around the slave economy is hardly realistic in the slightest.
And to top things off, the photo in the article was of a Confederate moon landing. I wonder which flag of the Confederate repertoire Willmott chose to place on the moon....that's right. The BATTLE flag, not the ACTUAL flag of the CSA.
The movie is poorly researched and has little insight into fact. I for one will not be watching it, and I am loathe to think about the impact it will have on those who do.
And the icing on the cake was that the reveiwer gave it 3/5 stars. So much for movie-goers knowing where the fallacies lie.
Firstly, there are a number of discrepencies that tell me his attitude toward the causes of the Civil War are grossly infantile, namely, that he believes it was ENTIRELY about race. His "modern" CSA has such wonderful commodities as "shackles", an electronic collar used to keep slaves in line, the "Home Slave Shopping Network", and "Darkie Toothpaste". This points to a CSA where slavery remained the primary economic commodity when in fact, leading up to the Civil War, slavery was beginning to go out of fashion. By 1900, slavery would have been de facto abolished if not legally so, so a modern CSA where so much is built around the slave economy is hardly realistic in the slightest.
And to top things off, the photo in the article was of a Confederate moon landing. I wonder which flag of the Confederate repertoire Willmott chose to place on the moon....that's right. The BATTLE flag, not the ACTUAL flag of the CSA.
The movie is poorly researched and has little insight into fact. I for one will not be watching it, and I am loathe to think about the impact it will have on those who do.
And the icing on the cake was that the reveiwer gave it 3/5 stars. So much for movie-goers knowing where the fallacies lie.