Customer Reviews

Gettysburg: The Boys in Blue & Gray

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I wondered through the entirety of this documentary for whom it was created:

Anyone unfamiliar with the battle will find a pathetically acted, incoherent chain of events narrated in an archaic style of english which can be understood only with difficulty.

Anyone familiar with the battle will find a painful, if brave, attempt at acting glossed-over summaries of events, with narration policed from overly-familiar footnotes found in any two or three books on the subject.

Had I seen this documentary at any other time, I would have found it enormously frustrating to watch. But by coincidence, I began reading Stephen Sears' "Gettysburg" this week -- an excellent book which, like most detailed military historical writing, presents only clouded imagery for the mind's eye beyond the arrows and rectangles drawn on the maps.
I found this film a good complementary visual supplement to that reading. Here you can traverse the ground within the landscape and within the main formations. I find no other usefulness to this documentary.

Placed into uniform upon their terrain, the re-enactors do what they do best -- To *show* what these events looked like. If the film does little more than that, it also does nothing less.
In the end, the most appreciative audience for this film will be other re-enactors.

It is a good summary of the battle at Gettysburg, with a description of each day's major events and some aftermath. However, the acting was horrible. PBS used historians who I would guess had never acted before. I give amateurs credit for having the guts to put on period costumes and attempt to portray historical figures but most of them were simply bad at it. However, a nice touch was a great-great-great-etc nephew of Confederate General George Pickett played Pickett in the movie. I also felt the battle scenes were well done although on a limited scale.