I've seen elementary school plays that contain better acting. At several points in the movie, actors flub their lines. It's blatantly obvious, and no attempt was made to edit them out.

If far-right Klansmen (now members of the Sons of the Confederacy) working at the conspiracy loving newspaper, the Augusta Chronicle wrote and produced a film on skewed views of the Civil War, this would be it.

The film centers mostly on Confederate Captian RL Chessman (with a potbelly) as he goes from believing it would be a short victorious war to attempting to keep his son from joining. There is also a James Peabody who marches with Sherman who appears to have certain business connections that were not well developed.

The Southerners were all gentlemen who were all polite while the Yankees were all cruel drunks. From what I can tell, both Peabody and Chessman were fictional composites. The acting and sound were bad. The Yankees has Southern accents too. At about 59 minutes into the film, you can see a microphone shadow in a nighttime scene, upper left. Not worth the time.

Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity.

Well, given the very low rating that this 2019 Western have been getting on IMDb, I must admit that I wasn't particularly thrilled about watching it. But still, it was a movie that I hadn't already seen before, plus it was centered around the American Civil War, so of course I had to watch it.

And believe you me, this movie was bad from an entertainment perspective. There was no red thread throughout the course of the entire movie, and everything felt like it was just a compilation of randomly shot scenes that were put together to make a movie. And it beats me what writer and director Christopher Forbes was thinking here with that approach to the movie. Surely, someone must have stopped at a point along the way and asked "Sir, why is there no coherency to what we are doing?"

The storyline was just utter rubbish. As I just mentioned above, there is not coherency to the storyline. It felt like I was watching a selection of endlessly random scenes.

As for the acting in the movie, well let's just say that the acting performances were dubious at best. So you should not expect to see any grand performances to match those seen in the 1993 "Gettysburg" or the 1989 "Glory".

The cutting and editing of the movie was just atrocious, and it felt like something performed on a high school amateur level. Yup, it was that bad.

What worked for the movie, however, was the costumes and the props. That was definitely something worth watching. But sadly, that was essentially all that "American Confederate" had going for it. That and the movie's cover, which was the reason why I picked up the movie.

If you enjoy movies that are set in the American Civil War, then you might want to skip on this movie, because it is a mess and a waste of time. I am rating "American Confederate" a generous two out of ten stars. I managed to sit through it, but this was an ordeal to get through, and I wasn't entertained nor enjoying what director Christopher Forbes served.