time with tens of thousands of extras (many of them expert Civil War re-enactors) and a cast that includes Robert Duvall as Gen. Robert E. Lee and Stephen Lang as the doomed, charismatic Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson. Jeff Daniels plays Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor who gave up a promising academic career to enlist with the Union army, alongside Mira Sorvino as his wife Fanny.

  "Gods And Generals is a much more broadly focused film than Gettysburg," Maxwell says of the sprawling epic. It was shot in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland and covers a two-year period of engagement in swamps, forests and streets when the South was winning. The battles are a thumbnail sketch of American History 101 - John Brown's Raid at Harpers Ferry, Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, climaxing with the Battle of Chancellorsville.

  For the cast, the movie represented a consummate challenge to bring to life people whose faces are literally etched in stone. "(They) fulfilled and maybe exceeded my expectations - which were high, I can tell you," Maxwell told The Washington Times. "You can't play an icon, you've got to play a living flesh-and-blood character. And this is a very, very emotional film."

  He singles out as a favorite scene, "where Chamberlain tells his wife, Fanny, that he's going to enlist. One of the reasons it was exceptionally poignant, is because we know that that scene is being played out all over America today, with men and women saying farewell to their spouses to go off and fight our war against terrorism."

  Gods And Generals will be anticipated, not just by film fans and Civil War buffs, but by fans of Bob Dylan, who was commissioned to write a suitably "rootsy" theme song for the movie. The seven-minute song "Cross The Green Mountain" sees Dylan "return to his roots as a folk-country balladeer," Maxwell says on his website, "the same roots that nourished the mountain men of western Virginia, the home of Thomas Jonathan Jackson, and countless others."

  As for Jeff Shaara, he plans to continue his father's work, including shepherding a film of the much darker denouement The Last Full Measure. "(My father) died too soon, and never understood the enormous impact his work had on so many people," Shaara told Randomhouse.com. "That is the responsibility I now carry.

  "It's easy to think of them as mere names in a history book. But I was amazed to meet a woman whose father fought in the Civil War-that's right, her father. She was born in 1920, when he was 75.

  "We are not that far removed from these events. The wounds are still open in many parts of the country, particularly in the South, where, for many people, the war never ended."

- Jim Slotek