The movie, The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich was “…the best film ever made about the Revolutionary War.” ummmm NOT!!! This movie was very unrealistic about the American Revolution and was “conventionally written and conventionally directed for a conventional audience.”

Not saying this movie was horrible and that I didn’t enjoy watching it, but how this movie represented the American Revolution was just awful! Although the cinematography was great. The battle scenes really came alive with sounds of gunfire, cannon, and shouted orders.

The central problem with The Patriot was that the movie was going around in circles. It never really focused on a main idea. There were a lot of small stories within this whole main idea of the American Revolution. There is the story of the war itself, the story of a family torn apart by the war, the story of a man wrestling with his past and his faith, and not one but two love stories. It never provided an actual humanistic approach to the plot. There was a lot of usages of tired clichés which only to weakened the narrative.

Even though we all knew the British were the “bad guys”, the depiction of the Brits were very unflattering. Everything the British did in the movie seemed so evil….they were poorly portrayed. The part when we see British soldiers lock the population of a town in a church and burn it does absolutely nothing for the movie other than make the villains seem deliberately cruel.

My favorite part about watching The Patriot however, was getting to see the deleted scenes. Seven scenes are presented, which can be watched with or without commentary by Devlin and Emmerich. This section was also frustrating because it showed that some of the best, most emotional scenes in the movie were cut out due to concerns about the running time. There is one scene in particular where Benjamin Martin holds a makeshift family funeral for his son Thomas. Mel Gibson’s acting in this scene, his depiction of Martin’s struggle with his own faith and his guilt over his past, are so powerful and honest that this scene would have added a lot to the movie. The funeral scene only runs for about a minute, and in my mind it was a huge mistake to cut it from the final version of the picture.

This movie actually opened on the weekend of 4th of July which is kind of ironic because it doesn’t really depict the American Revolution anyways. This was just an average action flick in which Hollywood came along and twisted the story and left out really important parts to the movie because they were worried about the running time. I was kind of disappointed though because this was a period in our history which changed America, and they should have deserved a much better examination.

[1] http://imdb.com/title/tt0187393/

[2] http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800353825/info

[3] http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Pavillion/3630/