Like a film about Titantic without the sinking

Rating: 3/10 (4 February 2013)

I felt frustrated with this film in the same way as with The Iron Lady; if I go to a film called Lincoln about such a great historical character, I really want to find out about the great sweep of his character through the most turbulent times in US history. Just as the Margaret Thatcher movie should more accurately have been called Dementia because that was 90% of what it dealt with, a more honest title for Lincoln should have been The 13th Amendment. This felt like a TV spin off from a proper movie: one action scene at the start to hook us in, then endless similar scenes of men talking in darkened smoke filled rooms to save money and fill out the interminable length of the film. A movie about Lincoln could easily fill 3 hours if we had much more about his life: but for most of this movie you could shut your eyes for fifteen minutes, open them again and you were in the same scene with the same conversation. Because of the God like status (thoroughly deserved) of Steven Spielberg, perhaps he's allowed to get away with anything, but really this is a very tedious film. Looking round the theater during that first couple of hours there was lots of seat shuffling and people dozing off; that speaks for itself.... We were even cheated at the end of seeing the great man shot dead in the theater; just somebody announcing it in a different theater. Why?!! It was like seeing a film about Titanic just showing the passengers talking about how unsinkable it was for three hours then not showing us the sinking at the end. Sorry, but I think this was a missed opportunity to have a proper film about Lincoln: let's hope there's a decent remake soon...