I always liked this movie, & this expanded version is certainly the one to have. The Kansas/Missouri border war from 1861-65 was a vicious little war inside a war, where mercy on either side was seldom shown to their opponents. But at least Mr. Ang Lee showed the major cause for it all, in showing the vicious Kansas Jay Hawkers & their brutal raids of plunder & murder throughout Western Missouri, & the bands of Southern Missouri guerrilla's that rose to the fore in brutal eye-for-an-eye retaliatory raids & tactics of their own. Sadly, as this film shows, there were psychopaths on both sides as the films main character, Jake Rodell would encounter one in the form of guerrilla Pitt Mackason. Though fighting on the same side together against the Kansans & union army, the atrocities of the war between the states in this theatre turned Pitt into a raging, out-of-control homicidal sociopath. Col. Quantrill, who led the guerilla raid on Lawrence, Kansas in August, 1863, for the most part, kept his men in check, & restricted their wrath to the men of the city, avoiding harming the Kansan women & children. But as the war progressed, the fighting got more & more merciless, with Quantrill's Lieutenant, Bloody Bill Anderson, breaking away into his own separate company, attracting the more lawless of the guerilla's into his band. Almost as often as not, this outfit robbed & killed Southerners as well as Unionists, all in the name of plunder. Such was the mentality of Pitt Mackason. The movie has a romantic twist as well, with Rodell falling for the beautiful widow of two fallen Rebel guerillas who later married her, after a stormy start, & ended up raising a fallen comrades child as his own. The first half of the film has many action scenes of the war, but the last half got a little draggy, as Rodell & a wounded comrade make a slow recovery from wounds from the Lawrence raid. This film is based on the book "Woe to Live On!" by an author whose name I don't remember, but was about the viciousness of the border war, where things on both sides got so terrible, that men literally lost the will to live on. A film well worth seeing, as Quantrill & the Missouri guerillas are seldom shown in Hollywood as anything but cut-throats. This film shows the true causes of the rise of the most effective guerilla warriors in American history, and why they did the things they did.