1999, 2 hrs, TNT original movie. Dir: John Gray. Cast: Armand Assante (Lt. Dixon), Donald Sutherland (General Pierre Beauregard).

Civil War Themes: The first military submarine, the Confederate's H.L. Hunley, also becomes the first sub to sink an enemy ship.

Battles/Moments: Federal bombardment of Charleson, S.C., the Hunley's raid on a Union ship.

      War movies centering around submarines have been done, and done very well by such fare as Das Boot. In the TNT original movie, The Hunley, Turner tries to create the same intensity in a film depicting the first military submarine to sink an enemy ship, the Confederate Army's H.L. Hunley.

      I do give some credit to Turner, though, for having the gumption to make a civil-war era film, the only studio willing to do so in the last decade. I don't know if the masterpice Glory scared many filmmakers into thinking all other Civil War films would be compared to such a great movie (as I'm doing now apparently), or if there just aren't any good scripts out there where a studio is willing to venture into the subject.

      Interest in The Hunley was increased when archaeologists in June discovered the graves of the original crew of the Hunley buried in a cemetery located under the football stadium of The Citadel. The movie, though, follows the Hunley's third and final crew as it attempts to thwart the Federal blockade of Charleston, South Carolina. This third crew successfully sank one Federal ship before promptly sinking. In 1995 the sub was discovered four miles off Sullivans Island near Charleston. The second voyage of the Hunley sank on a training run, killing the eight sailors aboard, all of whom are buried in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery.

      The submarine was shown as a great curiosity by the local folk, as much as the first ironclad, the Virginia, a.k.a. the Merrimac. As a Southerner I feel a twinge of pride knowing that it was the Confederacy, not the Union, which built these advanced ships first.

      The Hunley opens with the sinking of the second crew, gasping for air as the sub sinks further to the bottom of the bay, intensely showing what had to be a truly harrowing experience. Too bad the final voyage's deadly end wasn't shown with as much emotion.

      Armand Assante plays Lt. Dixon, the ship's captain and biggest supporter of the Hunley, battling Donald Sutherland as womanizing Gen. Beauregard (who also screwed up at Shiloh, not forcing the Union into the Tenn. River when given the chance and thus losing the battle the next day), who is a serious pessimist about the project.

      Assante is the typical battle-hardened veteran: misses his wife who died in the sea, saw too much death and destruction, and thus drinks a lot while meandering through a bombardment as if unaware of the shelling around him, no longer afraid of death and almost wishing it to happen (think Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon). Assante was fine in the role, nothing to write home about but also not someone who ruined the movie.

      Many critics focus on the accents of the players. Obviously none of the actors is from the south, and Sutherland has three or four different dialects in the movie, sometimes the same sentence. But I'm not one to detract from a film because the actors aren't talking "genuinely" Southern. I enjoyed Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and didn't even notice that he was without an English accent.

      The crew and comraderie of the sailors in The Hunley is cookie-cutter, pure cliche. They drink, they fight, they ultimately bond then die. There's the Irishman who is a great fighter and is unfriendly (obviously becomes soft-hearted at the end), the guy with glasses who is intelligent, the rough brute who catches fish with his bare hands, the over-eager youngster, a pacifist and a reluctant sailor who easily gets seasick.

      We're supposed to empathize or sympathize with these guys, but there was no connection between the viewer and the characters, and there seldom is when dealing with soldiers' stereotypes. Instead, I'm spending an hour-and-a-half waiting for the ultimate build-up: the Hunley's final mission.

      The last half-hour deals with this historic moment, yet was not as tense as it should have been. Frankly I was bored. Maybe the previous hour lulled me to sleep, but by the finale I was sarcastic, not moved by the way the soliders die. I couldn't help but wonder, if they're 20 feet under water, then let the sub flood inside, then the pressure should be okay to open the hatch and swim to the surface. Am I wrong, or does this make sense?

      Obviously, then, I wasn't impressed by the special effects, either. They're supposed to be attacking Union ships in the Charleston harbor, which is the Atlantic Ocean, yet when the sub was moving around it looked like they were in the lake down the street from my apartment. Besides being in an obviously freshwater location, the city of Charleston is drab and colorless, and I know it's being shelled but it was ridiculous how there was no color at all. Maybe a purposeful texture of the filmmaker? Or just poor planning? I know they are on a cheap budget and there are ways to hide such shortcomings, but The Hunley seems to take pride in its low-budget effects.