Reply #12: Not great.

[carpetbagger]

I enjoyed Gettysburg a great deal. I own it, and watch it regularly both for the movie itself as well as for the fact that it's the best example of mid-Atlantic scenery I can find on video. I lived in Harpers Ferry for several years, and in Maryland for several years before that. Gods and Generals tried to replicate the format, but failed. Here's my analysis...

These two movies were both the modern equivalent of an oratorio. The characters give stock speeches throughout in an attempt to tell a classical story. Gettysburg, the battle, was a great story to tell. It happened in a narrow frame of time and place, so that you were able to experience on a 4hr=4day scale the events of the battle. The story was the battle, and the asides were just that.

Gods and Generals tried to bite off too large a time frame, several months leading up to the Chancellorsville campaign. You don't get the sense of real-time that made Gettysburg work (and by extension Alamo movies, Pearl Harbor movies, and more modern military drama from Failsafe/Strangelove to The Day After). Also, the asides, especially the intrusion of cute children, were at times the main plot rather than an aside to any of a number of main plots that would have made a good historical play based on the ANV's formative period.

I got the sense that Gettysburg was a story telling the myths, some true, some false, most inbetween, held by most people who have successfully told the story of the battle (Foote, Coddington, Pfanz, the National Park Service, and many of the generals who went on to publish their stories, best collected in the 4-volume "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War"). I got the sense that Gods and Generals was more the telling of the myths held by, well, civil war reenactors (the best recounting of these folks is the book "Confederates in the Attic").

On edit: Definitely record it. Definitely watch through at least parts of it. There's great scenery, and good battle scenes (although I use the term loosely, since the battle scenes are somewhat contrived like most movie battles that occured prior to, say, Saving Private Ryan or some of the Vietnam movies). But if you're expecting something like Glory, or even "The Last Days of Patton", you'll be disappointed. And don't let the oratorio-play style dissuade you from watching Gettysburg, which is executed quite well.