A Huge Disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2013)

After much chomping at the bit, I finally got to see Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln". I'm surprised to say that my initial reaction, overall, is disappointment. It fell far short of my expectations.
Yes, the movie does look and sound great, with good casting and acting. But the experience as a whole fell flat for me.
Why? The movie's PLOT. The whole plot concept was wrong before the script was even started - misguided and inappropriate to what this film could have been, and should have been.
As the title implies, this promised to be the definitive movie on Abraham Lincoln. It was not. Rather than being a biopic, it's a political thriller about passing the 13th Amendment. Why didn't they give the movie an accurate title, like "The 13th", or "Lincoln's 13th", or something? The movie spans only about one month of Abe's life. It pretends the president had little else to attend to at that time (like, um, the Civil War). And it somehow still manages to run 2.5 hours.
Maybe it's because I'm a history buff. Getting the 13th Amendment passed was a foregone conclusion. There was never any doubt about it at that point. It was done when it was done to seal the Confederacy's fate and to rub their collective nose in it.
And the single action scene - the opening hand-to-hand battle sequence - didn't feel real at all. Maybe Spielberg intended it to be "surreal", but it just seemed plain unrealistic. From Spielberg, no less.
They got the world's most famous director, a massive budget, and the best of everything else to make this movie, and wasted it on a script I could have cranked-out for homework in the 6th grade.
Spielberg missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expertly retell Lincoln's life, or at least his presidency. D-Day-Lewis' curious portrayal of Lincoln is certainly worth a DVD rental, but this film is not really worth buying or seeing at the theater. Damn shame.
I'm glad a lot of people apparently think it's fantastic. I wish I did.