Review of Gettysburg: Three Days of Destiny

Dull and poorly-paced, this dramatization, while massive in its scope, utilizing thousands of civil war reenactors, fails to give the viewer any real information about the battle's range and significance. Relying upon spoken excerpts from memoirs of those who were there, the film is visually and audibly authentic, but the viewer is never really given a sense of how the different segments of the battle fit together. A visual map at the beginning shows how the troops arrived at Gettysburg, but this is never repeated – more of these showing how the battle developed, and narration to tie together the various vignettes and add some clarity to the film would be helped immensely. Baritone musical interlude "A-tenting we will go" stops the film in its tracks, although the synth musical score by Nicholas Palmer is rather effective. This is like glimpsing the battle through binoculars but having no clue how the different scenes really work together.