7 / 10
Ironclads is a TNT made-for-television movie from 1991 about the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862. Delbert Mann directed it. Virginia Madsen plays Betty Stuart, a Confederate spy in the Norfolk Navy Yard. Reed Edward Diamond plays a Union officer. Alex Hyde-White plays Lieutenant John L. Worden, commander of the USS Monitor.
The film traces the parallel construction of the CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack, salvaged and rebuilt as an ironclad) and the USS Monitor, leading to the first battle in history between two armored steamships on March 9, 1862. The film is small, competent, and historically responsible within the limits of cable television production.
The actual battle changed naval warfare overnight. Every wooden warship in every navy on Earth became obsolete by the end of the second day. The race between the two ironclad designs is one of the great technological stories of the nineteenth century and the film treats it with suitable seriousness.
I’ve got a weakness for modest, earnest history like this, and Ironclads mostly rewards it. The two ships are the stars, and I enjoyed every minute the film spent on iron plate and turrets. What holds it at a 7 is a spy story I’d have cut entirely if anybody had asked me.
The Ships
The production commissioned working-scale models of both the Monitor and the Virginia.
The miniature work is the production’s strongest element. The audience gets a clear sense of the two very different design philosophies behind the ships. The Virginia is a converted steam frigate plated with iron, broadside guns, and a single ram on the bow. The Monitor is a low-slung iron raft with a single rotating turret containing two large naval guns. They look like ships from different centuries because they were.
The combat sequence is well staged given the production constraints. The ships circle each other in the Hampton Roads channel firing at point-blank range, and most shots bounce off the armor.
I love watching both crews grow frustrated as generations of naval tactics fail against the new technology. That stalemate is the reason I’d sit through this film again.
For Writers
A technological shift makes a good story because the audience watches existing methods become obsolete in real time. The crews of the Monitor and the Virginia fought with weapons and tactics that had been developed across generations of wooden ship combat. Within forty-eight hours all of it had to be rethought. The lesson is that watershed moments in technology are durable narrative material. The reader can feel the change. Find these moments in your subject and stage them as crises instead of as accomplishments.
The Spy Plot
Virginia Madsen’s Confederate spy character is the film’s weakest invention. The script needs a way to track the Confederate side of the construction race, and giving a Northern audience a Confederate-sympathetic point-of-view character creates more problems than it solves. The character is competent. The performance is fine. The framing forces the audience into sympathy with a character whose specific goal is the survival of the Confederacy at a moment when the Confederacy’s defeat was both inevitable and morally necessary.
The handling here is clumsy. The script seems to assume a Confederate spy is a romantic figure on the same terms a Union spy might be in another film, and the moral context doesn’t support the equation. Every time it cut back to Betty Stuart, I wanted to be back in the shipyard.
For Writers
Point-of-view choices have moral implications even in genre fiction. A story told from the perspective of a Confederate spy implies that the audience should care about the Confederate cause the spy’s work serves. If the writer isn’t prepared to make that case, the choice of point of view is wrong. The lesson is that sympathy follows perspective. If you don’t want the audience to side with a character’s goals, don’t put the camera behind that character’s eyes.
What Works
Its treatment of the historical narrative is respectful. The film makes clear that the Virginia destroyed two wooden Union warships on its first day in action, including the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress, and that the Monitor’s arrival the next morning was the only thing that prevented the Virginia from breaking the Union blockade of Hampton Roads. It makes the strategic stakes clear.
The construction sequences are my favorite part of the film. They show the technical decisions and improvisations that produced both ships. The Virginia’s builders had to work with the burned hulk of the Merrimack and figure out how to plate iron over a wooden frame.
The Monitor’s designer, John Ericsson, had to convince a skeptical Navy to bet on his radical design. I’d happily have watched a whole film about Ericsson arguing with the Navy.
For Writers
Process scenes work when the writer understands the work being depicted. The construction sequences in Ironclads are interesting because the script paid attention to the actual decisions the builders had to make. Plating iron over wood. Designing a turret that rotates with steam pressure. Solving the heat problem inside the Monitor’s gun deck. The lesson is that detailed competence in process material reliably holds an audience’s interest. The reader doesn’t need to know what they’re watching is accurate.
They only need to feel that the writer knew.
Craft Note
Delbert Mann directed. Harold Gast wrote. Virginia Madsen as Betty Stuart. Alex Hyde-White as Lieutenant John L. Worden. Reed Edward Diamond as Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones. E. G. Marshall as Gideon Welles. Released March 1991 on TNT. Made-for-cable production. Miniature work by an experienced effects team. Approximate ninety-three minute runtime.
Is Ironclads worth watching?
It’s a 7 because the ships and the shipbuilding are good enough to sustain a film that spends too much of its runtime on a spy I never cared about. The miniatures and the construction scenes are the main pleasure. If nineteenth-century naval history interests you at all, I think you’ll have a good time. If you want a major Civil War drama, this modest TNT movie won’t give you one.
