Andersonville (1996)

Review by All Movie Guide
In a genre crowded with classic films like Rules of the Game, Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Bridge on the River Kwai, Andersonville may be forgiven for falling short of that august company. To simply document the horrendous conditions in that Georgia camp wouldn't have made for very involving drama, so writer David Rintels created several "events" on which to hang his story. As in every POW film, escape is foremost in the minds of the featured group of prisoners. But in Andersonville, that event occurs at the halfway point of the film, and after all of the men are either caught, killed, or wind up dead after suffering punishment, there is a second event. The prisoners' revenge on the Raiders, with the trial and punishment shown in great detail, is Rintels' way of showing how the majority of the Union soldiers would not succumb to barbarism, no matter how badly they were treated. As a variation on that point, he later shows a Confederate officer offering to release whoever will join the cause of the South. Their mass refusal, even though they've been told that the North is not interested in an exchange of prisoners, provides Rintels and director John Frankenheimer with the film's best scene, as thousands of men, one company at a time, turn their backs on the officer and march off. The film has other moments almost as powerful as these, but it doesn't create the rich gallery of characters that the best POW films have. And its grotesque portrayal of Henry Wirz, the camp commandant, as a strutting, bug-eyed Prussian, short-circuits one of this genre's most attractive features: the cat-and-mouse interplay between the officer prisoners and their often cultivated head captor. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide