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Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

An Exercise In Nonsense

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

With almost an hour left I am writing this review. I heard of this movie from my 12th grade History teacher. She taught an elective on just the Civil War and showed us a clip of this movie-also frequently referencing the sequel-Gods and Generals- which is also a good movie. This is very long-clocking in at 4 hours and 14 minutes long. This is the longest American movie ever made, even 25 years later. This length makes the movie overstay its welcome and distracts the ADHD viewer(hence why I am watching the movie as I write this review), however it is very well made and should be seen by those into history. Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is probably the best performance. Oh, and another fact about my teacher-she begged her mom to take her, and so she dropped her off at the theater and said she would pick her up in another 4.5 hours. I told her if I were born then I would have watched it with her! She also, believe it or not, had a cameo in the aforementioned Gods and Generals(in the 9 hour extended cut). Now, back to Gettysburg, I watched Part 1 last night, which is what you may have to do. A little background on the battle may help too. All things said and done, as much as it drags it is very much worth your time as a time capsule to the middle of The Civil War and despite it's length should be seen. Besides, the battle took 3 days to fight. What's 4.5 hours of 1 or 2 days to you?

In 1863, the Northern and Southern forces fight at Gettysburg in the decisive battle of the American Civil War.While this is truly a great film and one that probably got many people interested in history and the Civil War, it is also sort of strange in its forced portrayal of the events. Despite a massive budget, some of the beards look ridiculously fake. And the dialogue is often very unnatural, thrown in to make a point. The speech where it is shown that many Confederate soldiers were the grandchildren of Revolutionary War patriots is very interesting, but it is extremely unlikely that any such conversation happened. Why would a general even know who a soldier's great-uncle was? Anyway, if you can ignore the beards and the overly-clean uniforms, this is a pretty spectacular movie that goes out of its way to get an emotional response from people.

I found the movie very interesting especially how well the attacks were planned by both sides before battle also the mind set of the soldiers both for the north and the south impressed me. They showed just how much they cared for what they were fighting for and what they wanted as a result from this war. This movie also shows just how bad the civil war really was. Also I didn't realize that so many generals and high ranking officials died during this war. It just shows that they didn't put their lives before the lives of the soldiers that they were commanding. One other thing I was surprised about was how Robert E.Lee didn't really listen to his fellow generals about how they feel they should attack the Union instead he felt his way was always the best but that proved to be wrong at Gettysburg.

Although I am not usually interested in history movies, the movie did a good job of keeping me interested throughout in the Civil War. It also opened my eyes to the true horrors of the Civil War. Although not gory or graphic in any way, the movie depicts the high death rates in the war and how it deeply affects the soldiers and especially the generals. I thought the acting in the war was good as well. Sheen's portrayal of Lee was very good, I thought. The movie has some good scenes as well, the action scenes especially. However, the movie fails in some parts, too. Most noticeably, it was obviously too long. It has the record as the longest American movie ever made, I think, and it shows. It could have easily been cut down by at least an hour, by shortening some of the seemingly endless marching scenes. There was one marching period that I timed to be nearly six minutes long. This had no dialogue and just showed people walking and bring on horseback. Overall, I thought the movie was good and kept me interested throughout, but it could have been much better. It remains, to me at least, a good movie, but more for people who are very serious about history.