Gettysburg has not aged well

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2015)

My feelings toward this movie are rather ambiguous and therefore not likely to be well received by people who thoroughly enjoyed it. I will divide my opinion about it in a part about what I liked and a part about what I didn't like.
I liked that the actors and their performances and I also liked the fact that the officers they represented and their armies very much looked the part. Troop maneuvering and costumes, the large hats, the gloves, the cigars. A lot of effort seems to have been invested to strive for historical accuracy. Acting was great in my opinion, especially by Martin Sheen and Tom Berenger.
The parts I didn't like included the moments where some of the officers engage in conversation with each other and reflect on the moral and historical implications of their actions. These scenes were so obviously directed at the viewer, to provide a sense of historical perspective or explain a particular kind of military maneuver that they merely humored me. The British emissary present with the Confederate army is used on multiple occasions for scenes like this and especially the part where he explains a military tactic to the commander that is supposed to perform a vital part of it borders on ridiculousness.
Secondly the fighting scenes are hard to watch. They look more like historical re-enactment scenes you would watch on a news report than they do a modern movie. In some scenes you can actually discern actors making very nonchalant moves (when they are supposed to be fighting for their lives). This is the weakest point of the movie in my opinion and it is especially apparent at the big charge at the center of the front near the end of the film. What's totally missing in these scenes is the utter horror and despair that I imagine real battles to be like. The actors and the scenes showed none of that. The human element of battle is also missing in its entirety, nowhere do we see the enormous fears that young men moving into battle must feel. There's mostly bravery and beautiful words from the officers. The level of violence is also very modest for a big war movie. When you see large troop maneuvering for example the explosions always seem to be right beside them. This makes sense from a filming perspective of course, but not much sense from a war movie-viewing perspective.
In short, I thought it was rather enjoyable if you can look past these shortcomings and don't expect a very realistic representation of what the civil war was really like: a bloodbath. In this movie you will see a lot of dressed up men with beards that are very gracious towards one another and seem more concerned with their former comrades now turned enemies than they are with their own troops or themselves. In my opinion there must have been a good deal of hatred on both sides, which is natural to occur after some of your friends have died in a gruesome way. The movie is therefore a better depiction of war movie-making history than it is of war itself. To me it was a lot like The Longest Day when compared to Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. The Longest Day is an enjoyable movie but large parts of it are utterly ridiculous from a historic point of view. Gettysburg is very much like that and looks more a 1960s movie than it does like a one from the 1990s.