Not bad, perhaps, but soooo overrated...

Rating: 3/10 (9 March 2001)

I just don't get the big deal about this movie. I wouldn't go so far as to call it actively bad, but why everybody insists on praising it to high heaven is beyond me.
Sure, the statistics are impressive enough: monster length, color, all-star cast, ambitious special effects which were probably unique at the time. It's clear enough that the movie *wants* to be big. The problem is that sheer flamboyance by itself does not make a great movie. The heart of a truly brilliant movie is in the characters and the plot.
And there's the rub. Neither the characters nor the plot do much for me. The characters are, to put it mildly, unlikable. Scarlett in particular has no redeeming features at all; she is just the whiniest, prickliest, most selfish piece of mischief I have ever wanted to say "Frankly, my dear, you make me want to hurl" to. The other characters are either just as selfish and unlikable or so downtrodden that my initial pity for them has eroded away to nothing by the end of the movie (another drawback of its ambitious length).
As to the plot--well, it's basically one melodramatic potboiler run into another melodramatic potboiler run into another... I can stand (even like) melodrama in small doses, but "as God is my witness, this movie will never move me to tears again" (as a matter of fact it never did in the first place, but anything for a pun...).
For the reasons just outlined, I do not agree with the widespread opinion that this is a great movie. Whether it is a good movie is a matter of taste and probably depends largely on how easily one can stomach its lesser flaws, the most glaring of which is its casual racism (that one carpetbagger just *had* to be an "uppity n---er," didn't he?). But I wouldn't call it a flawed masterpiece--just a flawed melodramatic potboiler with rather uninteresting characters.