Movie Review of Gettysburg (1993)

I over-use the word 'epic', particularly in regard to movies.  But what other word is there for a picture of this magnitude?

When the cast-members number in the tens of thousands, and the long shots take in views that sweeping and dramatic - without recourse to CGI - then there is no better description.

The 1993 movie Gettysburg is epic. 

It's also the longest American film ever shown.  The theater version is four and a quarter hours; the director's cut even longer.

Gettysburg was originally shot as a mini-series, but when financier Ted Turner saw it, he decided to send it into the cinemas instead.  It's not hard to see why.  This is a movie which demands to be shown on a big screen.  You need that to take in the sheer scale.

The wealth of historically accurate background detail is over-whelming.  Civil War enthusiasts were drafted in from all over America.  They brought with them their own uniforms, weapons and all the other bits and pieces which make them look authentic.

These were people obsessed with getting every tiny detail correct.  They re-enact the period in troops from Georgia to Washington State.  But in 1992, they were following in the footsteps of their grandparents or great-grandparents by amassing outside the real town of Gettysburg.

In some cases, this was quite literally.  A man in the blue uniform of the Army of the Potomac was standing on the stone wall, overlooking the re-enactment of Pickett's Charge.  He realized, with a chill and a welling of emotion, that he was standing on precisely the same spot, where his own grandfather witnessed and shot upon the real thing.

He wasn't the only emotional soul on in that place.  Different actors kept recalling the same thing in similar words.  This was the real Gettysburg battlefield.  Permission had been wrangled into letting certain scenes be filmed there, like the (in)famous Pickett's Charge and the brutal clash at Little Round Top.

"It's hallowed ground," said one actor.  "Sacred ground," spoke another.  Jeff Daniels, who played Joshua Chamberlain, said that it was not like any other movie that he had ever acted in. There was all that weight of responsibility.  Hallowed, sacred ground; and the ghosts of the dead watching on. 

Day three, of course, is Pickett's Charge.  Just writing the words cannot begin to express the cinematic brilliance of those scenes. 

It was re-enacting this which convinced so many Civil War enthusiasts to take their valued period collections to the Gettysburg battlefield. That included the canon artillery, which mostly belonged to re-enactors.  Few had seen so many fired at the same time.  The ground shook under them.

Those were the real trees in which the Confederate soldiers waited and prayed.  That is the actual ground upon which the real charge occurred.  The real stone wall was what awaited those actors who followed their predecessors in reaching the 'High-water Mark of the Confederacy'.

In short, it was as real as it could possibly be.  Watching it play out was both awe-inspiring and downright upsetting.

Let's start by stating here that Gettysburg is not meant to be utterly faithful to what happened on the battlefield between July 1st and 3rd 1862.  That's not the story that it's telling.

At least, it is, but removed by one step.  The movie is very loyal to The Killer Angels, which is an historical novel.  It's not a text book.  There's a distinction.

Historical novelists can take liberties.  They are capturing the emotion of a scene and putting words in their character's mouths.  While those people may once have lived and breathed, it may not be 100% as written in these tales.

That said, Michael Shaara was a Civil War buff and he was incredibly respectful of the reality of the Battle of Gettysburg.  He endlessly researched personal diaries and letters to gain an insight into the thoughts of the people who lived it.

His findings helped to humanize his characters and flesh out his detail.  Then Ronald F. Maxwell adapted Shaara's writing into this movie's screenplay.

It was all a bit sanitized and clean, emphasizing the glory over the futility and ugliness of war.  But otherwise there was little with which I could pick fault.

The fact that the movie was filmed at Gettysburg, with a team of historians advising and hordes of re-enactors ready to speak up, really did keep things on a level. 

There were some factual errors, which IMDb has listed.  They all appear to be quite minor points.

Apparently, when Randy Edelman was first offered the chance to write the soundtrack to this movie, he refused. 

It was the length of it, plus the momentousness of the subject matter, which caused him to balk.  He didn't think that he was equal to the task.  It took much persuasion and a copy of The Killer Angels shoved under his nose to finally get him to say yes.

At the risk of being lampooned, I wish he'd listened to his instinct.  I adored the screenplay; and I was moved time and again by the direction.  There were people on my screen acting their hearts out and carrying me with them.

Then this over the top of it, distracting me greatly. 

I appear to be in the minority here though.  Despite Edelman's lack of awards for the Gettysburg OST, all I keep reading are fans gushing over it.  But to me it came across as corny through to cheesy in parts.  Epic adventure and sweeping historical scenes had accompaniment that sounded suspiciously like my uncle playing on his keyboard.

I don't know.  Maybe it's just me.  Judge for yourself with a couple of tracks - the main title of the movie is played over the opening credits, up above.  Below is Men of Honor.

The Bechdel Test seeks to evaluate the representation of women in movies.  It asks three simple questions.  The film has to pass all three.

Firstly, is there more than one named female character in Gettysburg?   No. 

The fact that the other two questions kind of follow on from that one renders the whole test a fail.

The closest we got was Olivia Maxwell's character, who appears briefly to encourage Buford's passing Union cavalry.  Nice bit of trivia here, insofar as the actress is the daughter of Ronald F. Maxwell, who wrote the screenplay.

However, her character was credited only as 'Tantytown Woman'.  There wasn't another woman for her to have a conversation with, let alone about subjects other than the men.

There is an argument to be made that Gettysburg isn't really a film about women.  It's about hundreds of thousands of men rushing onto a battlefield, where 51,000 of them will be slaughtered.

But there were women there.  At least five of the soldiers were women dressed up as men (three Confederates and two Union).  There were other women with less salubrious roles in the camps too. 

The field hospitals had nurses; and the town had its female side of the population. The only civilian killed during those three days was a woman.  Jennie Wade was in her kitchen, tending the wounded, when gunfire passed through her front door.  It killed her outright.

So yes, there was the opportunity to include a few female characters in this movie, though the reality was that their numbers were undoubtedly swamped by the men.