The Uprising review

This is my boy Andrew Garfield playing an unnamed farmer who loses his wife and children to the Black Death and eventually becomes one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The historical leaders Wat Tyler and John Ball are here, but this isn’t really their story. Paul Greengrass decided to build the movie around a man history never named at all. There’s also some proto-Robin Hood mythos around the edges, and apparently they’re selling this as a sort of Robin Hood origin story, but that’s not really what the movie is. This is more narrowly focused than that. It’s basically a step-by-step retelling of the revolt, and when it started, I thought I knew where they were going with this. Revolution.

You’ve got the masses rising up against the economic and political system that’s oppressing them, marching on London and confronting the people who hold all the power. This is the kind of thing Marxist and socialist types look back at as a precursor to the revolution they dream about, where the masses finally revolt against their economic oppressors and overthrow the lords of capital. Obviously, these people weren’t sitting around in 1381 reading Marx, so I’m imposing ideas that came hundreds of years later on them, but you can see why people look back at something like the Peasants’ Revolt that way.

There’s also a version of the story where this is part of the development of individual rights and liberties in England and eventually the end of serfdom there. Maybe. Historians can argue about how much credit the revolt actually deserves for any of that. I’m watching a movie. I don’t need Paul Greengrass to settle 600 years of historical debate for me. I just need him to make an interesting movie out of what is already a pretty fascinating piece of history.

Unfortunately, this was a struggle.

And that’s frustrating because you can see all the pieces of a really good movie sitting right there. Andrew Garfield is an excellent actor. I love that guy. He’s one of my favorite actors working right now and, yes, he’s the one true Spider-Man. Cosmo Jarvis is here. Jamie Bell is here. The acting isn’t the problem. Visually, the movie looks like what I want a movie about a medieval peasant uprising to look like. The money is on the screen. The talent is on the screen. The problem is the writing.

You have peasants who believe they’re being exploited, a 14-year-old king trying to hold onto power, advisers manipulating him, competing interests around the throne, people making promises they may or may not intend to keep, and thousands of pissed-off people marching toward London demanding that the entire structure of their society change. You shouldn’t have to manufacture drama out of any of that. The history already did the work for you.

Instead, people keep making decisions and I don’t understand why they’re making them. Richard is young and being manipulated by the people around him. Fine. Show me that. Show me how they’re manipulating him. Show me what he’s afraid of. Show me why he listens to one person instead of another. Show me whether he’s arrogant, scared, stupid, malevolent, completely out of his depth, or just a 14-year-old kid trying to figure out what the hell he’s supposed to do while an army of peasants is marching toward him. Any of those things can work. Just give me something that explains the decisions he’s making.

I had the same problem with the rebels. These people are risking literally everything by rebelling against the entire social order they’ve lived under their whole lives. Why? Obviously, we know the broad answer. They’re being exploited and they’re pissed off. But individual people still have individual reasons for doing things. There should be disagreements among them. There should be different ideas about what they’re trying to accomplish and how far they’re willing to go. Instead, too often somebody does something because we’ve reached the part of the movie where that person needs to do it.

That’s particularly irritating in a historical movie because you’ve had 600 years to think about this shit. There’s an enormous historical record. You don’t have to agree with a decision somebody made in 1381 to make me understand why that person might have made it. If somebody was stupid, tell me he was stupid. If he was acting entirely out of self-interest, that’s fine too. If he genuinely thought he was doing the right thing and completely miscalculated, that’s interesting. Give these people motivations that make sense from where they’re standing, even if we know with 600 years of hindsight that what they’re doing is a terrible idea.

The movie just doesn’t do enough of that, and eventually what should be this fascinating collision between the crown and a massive popular revolt becomes a slog. Things happen to one side, then things happen to the other side, people make questionable decisions, and I kept waiting for the characters underneath all of this history to become more interesting. They never really did.

So this is a fail on the writing side for me. It’s not a fail on the acting side. It’s not a fail visually. Garfield is good, everybody looks the part, and there are individual scenes where you can see the much better movie this could have been. But the plot, the pacing and especially the characterizations don’t hold it together. That’s a pretty fundamental problem when you’re starting with historical material this rich.

I wanted this to be better. I really did. If you’re going to see it, try to catch it in a premium format because at least it looks nice. I just wish there had been as much going on underneath the images as there was on the screen.