One has to wonder if Maxwell didn't begin to realise that maybe he had gotten in over his head with the telling of this story and with so many characters central to the telling of it. While the Confederates certainly paint a more colourful picture, man to man, than the seemingly more wooden characters on the Union side, it detracts from what could have made the movie far and away more dramatic, as 'Gettysburg' managed to achieve a balance between telling the story going back and forth across the field, between the Confederate and Union sides, to tell the story. 'Stonewall' Jackson, paying mere lip service to the story of the Union men most prominently featured in the book, Winfield Scott Hancock and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Maxwell seems to have decided to focus the majority of the movie's story on Thomas J. We have no explanation as to why this happened, and so the audience is left to wonder why this ordinary citizen would end up becoming a Lieutenant Colonel in the 20th Maine Regiment of Volunteers. One minute, we see him in the classroom giving lessons, the next is a scene where his wife tells him that she knows he's going off to war and wonders why. Most telling is the lack of explanation of why Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of rhetoric and revealed religion at Bowdoin College in Maine, left the sanctity of the classroom to take up soldiering. So unless you've read the book, you might have no idea as to some of the central character's motivations for their actions. Unfortunately, it would seem that the material that he excised was vital to the telling of the story, as what seems to have been taken off was vital character exposition at the beginning of the story. This movie was originally slated to come in at a monumental 6 hours, but in advance screenings, it was found that audiences couldn't sit for that long, and so Ronald Maxwell took the hatchet to the film and sliced off over two hours to bring it in at under 4 hours.

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