It is almost like something is conspiring to prevent me from writing this review, an overview of TNT's Gettysburg, a four hour plus epic, with an epic cast (Martin Sheen, Jeff Daniels, Tom Berenger, etc) about an epic event, the battle that pretty much decided the conclusion of the American Civil War. The war would drag on for two more years after this, but the conclusion was all but foregone. As is mine, that even though I have lost two previous versions of this blog, I will see it to it's conclusion, because I simply must.
I don't know if it was Ted Turner, who is an avowed American Civil War buff and does have a cameo role in this film, or the material they were adapting, author Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, but the battle itself seems to be faithfully depicted. Not the usual Hollywood amalgamization of characters and events in a historical adaption, nor the jamming in of elements that weren't a part of recorded history, like a love story or what not. The closest they came to this is conversations between characters that seemed less for the characters at the time and more about summing up and sending messages to modern viewers. One example of that would C. Thomas Howell's Thomas Chamberlain conversing with a captured Confederate soldier about the war and why they are fighting it.
The American Civil War is an event that hangs with us to this day. And though many of us don't really give it much thought from day to day, all you have to do is look at the headlines of the day and see issues and events that still echo to those times, from race, to the culture of the states, to the size and purpose of government, the shots fired on American soil are still heard to this day. The blood shed may have paid the price for continued national unity, but the conversation from that day still goes on.
And as long as we are talking and seeking solutions, this is not a bad thing.
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