Movie Review

Beyond being a great adventure, the expedition of United States Army captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their self-proclaimed Corps of Discovery up the Missouri River and westward across the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean in 1804-1806 signaled a turning point in the history of North American exploration and settlement. President Thomas Jefferson's orders to them had been simple and to the point: "The aim of your expedition is to explore the Missouri River and those of its principal tributaries that, by their course and by linking with the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct and practical fluvial communications across this country to commercial ends." And although they did not find the hinted-at Northwest Passage across the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and adjoining Spanish lands, explore they did, and they found much more. They enlightened the new United States as to the extent and potential of the North American West and initiated the American entrance into the imperial struggle to possess a large part of it.

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It is the story of this major overland voyage of disclosure that director-producer Ken Burns, of Baseball and Thomas Jefferson fame, attempts to tell visually in the film Lewis and Clark, with varying results. The four-hour presentation is broken up into a pair of two-hour segments. Part 1 deals with the preparation for the expedition and its journey to the Continental Divide, and part 2 covers the journey from the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean and back to St. Louis. The problem is that while Burns is undeniably a master filmmaker, this mastery does not always carry over to the subject matter of history, especially when the demands of film and history conflict.

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