Mind-numbingly pretentious, manipulative and boring garbage

Rating: Null/10 (9 July 2013)

Typical Spielberg garbage in the guise of "history". Two and a half ponderous, pretentious, stiflingly boring hours about a few weeks in the life of the most overrated president in history. If he hadn't been assassinated, he might be seen now as the wildly destructive crackpot-on-a-mission he really was - a 19th century George W Bush - instead of as the wise, easy-going, deeply compassionate but pragmatic martyr this silly movie makes him out to be.
Because Lincoln refused to allow the southern states to secede, which they had the right to do under the constitution, nearly a million people were slaughtered and the economy was ruined. Although he won his war, the damage he caused the country still has not healed 150 years later. Anybody who believes that this is a united country has his head in the sand. The South is and always has been a separate society in every way and has NEVER fit with the North.
Just look at a red-state/blue-state map! The United States is made up of two distinct nations: one from the southeast westward, then up to the Canadian border and a skip northwest to Alaska; the other in the northeast, the west coast and Hawaii. It's a natural, organic division that has been here as long as there have been European settlers, and no amount of brainwashing or sappy movie-making will EVER change it. This has NEVER been a united country; it will never BE a united country. It's like trying to force Ireland to stay in the United Kingdom: it doesn't work.
We are TWO countries, not one. It was a bad marriage from the beginning. The South should have been allowed to leave peacefully 160 years ago, to effect an amicable divorce when amity was still possible. But Lincoln the zealot refused, and the mess he left is still tearing these unnaturally "United" States apart.
Slavery obviously was a peripheral issue, because it's long gone but the problems remain. Left on its own, the South would have eliminated slavery eventually anyway, as has every other civilized nation on earth. All Lincoln did by ramming it down the South's throat was to destroy the country, enforcing a union that has never worked, from 1620 until now.
Stupid movies like this just preach to the choir, reminding Lincoln-lovers why they love him so much and celebrating his stirring triumph over the bad old South, when a TRULY visionary leader would have let it go. The South might very well have WANTED to rejoin the union later, after it had learned for itself that slavery is unspeakably evil, but it never had that chance.
Lincoln did his best to destroy the South, and although he won his war he failed to annihilate the enemy. So now we have the South using Lincoln's very own Republican Party to wreak their vengeance on the rest of the country. Thanks a lot, Abe.