''WHO WILL GO WITH ME!''

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: GETTYSBURG

WRITER-DIRECTOR: RONALD F. MAXWELL

THE BOTTOM LINE: That cinematic rarity, an intelligent epic, reanimates one of history's crucial, tragic moments.

There are three compelling reasons to see Gettysburg. The first is General Robert E. Lee, the second is Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and the last is Brigadier General Lewis Armistead. They don't embrace all the contortions imposed on the human spirit by the military necessity, but they'll do for a potent, dramatic start. And their existence as well-drawn figures amid the hubbub of a four-hour epic speaks well for writer-director Ronald Maxwell's sober intentions and very creditable achievements in this film. Of the three, Martin Sheen's Lee is the most startling. In our folklore (and in the hearts of his troops) the Confederate leader has been granted near saintly status. Sheen gives us the dark side of the holy warrior, a man of courtly manners who is possessed by a vision of a vainglorious, straight-ahead assault on the enemy's center -- the vision that produced Pickett's disastrous charge. It was a course of action that defied reason (personified here by Lieutenant General James Longstreet, who is underwritten and underplayed by Tom Berenger). Lee's opposite number in the film's dramatic scheme is Colonel Chamberlain, commander of a ravaged regiment assigned to defend the Union flank on the hill known as Little Round Top. A college professor and, as played by Jeff Daniels, a soft-spoken humanist-idealist, he is democratic man at his best. And a commander of steely resolve. Almost out of ammunition, unable to withstand another Confederate charge, he mounts a bayonet assault of his own, downhill and through heavy woods (in the film's best combat sequence). Finally, there is the late Richard Jordan's Armistead, the film's great romantic, haunted by the fact that he must meet his best friend in battle -- haunted too by his unrequited love for the man's wife. ''Virginians! Who will go with me!'' he cries, rushing to his gallant doom. All these performances are touched with a sense of rue, a sense of lives caught up in forces they cannot master. This, together with our knowledge of the dreadful cost of the battle, lends a terrible poignancy to the film. The fact that Maxwell struggled for a decade to realize the project (even mortgaging his home to retain the rights to Michael Shaara's Pulitzer- prizewinning novel, The Killer Angels, on which he based his screenplay) lends a certain critical tolerance to one's view of the film, which lingers too long over the preparations for engagement, contains perhaps too many couriers galloping up with exposition and concludes with a battle that is handled rather distantly and bloodlessly. These flaws, though, are minor compared with the acuity of the film's best characterizations, the vaulting scale of its design and, above all, its old-fashioned belief that history, besides being instructive in itself, can -- and should -- be a great movie subject.