as long to watch as it took to fight

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2002)

This is a terribly long movie and you feel every minute of it. Not that being long is bad---some stories need that extra hour and when it is done like "Titanic" the time just flys by. But the pacing in "Gettysburg" is excrutiatingly slow, even most of the fighting is done at a walk or a trot.
The movie does have an authentic look to it and great care was made in having the actors look like twins of their real-life characters. The upside of using the Civil War reenactors is that the costuming of the extras is very good. But I agree with other comments---where did all these whizzened, elderly privates and corporals come from? You see far too many overweight extras---I can guarantee you that there certainly couldn't have been that many overweight Rebel soldiers, not given all the marching they did and the scanty food they had!
While it was good that the movie used the real Gettysburg battlefield, one jarring ananchronism is that as the camera pans over the Southern army prior to Pickett's charge, you can see a truck or a car driving down a road behind them.
The battle scenes, particularly Little Round Top, were done well in this movie but that is the only reason to see it. The acting in this movie is pretty bad with the exception of maybe three or four people. Jeff Daniels was in the running for an Oscar nomination as Joshua Chamberlain and Tom Berenger and Richard Jordan do well as Longstreet and Armistad. But I thought the rest of the actors were just too over the top. Martin Sheen's take on Lee was so reverent that you'd thought that he was playing Moses. The characters go on and on in these overwrought speeches and entire scenes are devoted to things like Southern generals debating the theory of evolution!
I've tried to like this movie but it simply puts me to sleep every time I see it. I've resorted to fast-forwarding to the battle scenes and leaving out the rest. Despite this being a Union victory, most of the story is told from the Southern perspective and one cannot help but feel a Southern bias in the movie. It was produced by Ted Turner who has a cameo as an officer killed in Pickett's Charge.