Gettysburg

Gettysburg (1993) is a four-hour American war epic directed by Ronald F. Maxwell — watch online on iFILM. July 1863: General Robert E. Lee pushes the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia into southern Pennsylvania, and the Army of the Potomac moves to meet him outside a small Pennsylvania town. Three days later, the course of the Civil War is decided.

Maxwell builds the film around three officers. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, played by Jeff Daniels, holds the Union's exposed left flank on Little Round Top with a few hundred men and a downhill bayonet charge that still appears in military textbooks. General Longstreet, a quietly tortured Tom Berenger, argues against Pickett's Charge and loses the argument. Martin Sheen's Lee carries himself like a man who already knows the weight is too heavy. The screenplay is based on Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, and Maxwell filmed on the actual battlefield in Pennsylvania — tens of thousands of reenactors in the field at once.

At four hours, it earns its length. The film refuses to make the charges look heroic — they look like what they were. Sam Elliott's General Buford sets the tone in the opening scenes: a professional reading terrain and understanding, immediately, that something irreversible is about to happen. Stream Gettysburg (1993) on iFILM.