The Uprising Review

The Peasants’ Revolt is one of the great historical events that schoolchildren in England are taught. It finally gets a film retelling thanks to Paul Greengrass.

In 1381, England was reeling from the aftermath of the Black Death. Half the population had died, and everyone had lost someone, including a nameless ploughman (Andrew Garfield) in Essex. The peasantry are pushed to breaking point when the Privy Council raise taxes on the commonfolk. When the Ploughman starts an uprising in his small village, he inadvertently starts a rebellion across the South East of England, with its leaders, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and John Ball (Jamie Ball), using the mob to march to London and petition Richard II (Woody Norman).

As a history nut, I was looking to The Uprising. I thought The Peasants’ Revolt would be a great subject for a film, and I was interested to see what Paul Greengrass would do. He’s the man who made three Bourne movies, Bloody Sunday, and Captain Phillips. The subject seemed ripe, considering the political climate, where there’s a growing wealth gap and the elite are brazen in their corruption and power grabs. So, it’s really sad to say The Uprising was a massive letdown.

Paul Greengrass has always been a political director. He started his career as a journalist and documentarian, and many of his films have had a political edge to them. He injected politics into the Bourne series. The Bourne Ultimatum was a damning indictment of the War on Terror and America’s willingness to use extrajudicial actions. One of the most intense yet provocative scenes in that film was when the CIA killed a journalist in the middle of Waterloo Station. However, the drawback of being a political director can be that the politics overpowers the narrative, as seen with Green Zone, which was an angry lecture about how the Bush administration misled the world about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and how unprepared they were for occupying the nation.

The Uprising was unsubtle with its political themes as it showed the downtrodden masses take out their anger on the upper classes. Greengrass aimed to draw modern parallels with the Peasants’ Revolt and today’s circumstances. The world in 1381 was hit hard by a sickness, and the aftermath led to the elites claiming more wealth and power, a political leader using a mob to get rid of his political opponents, and the wrath of the crowd was turned against the wrong target because they attacked immigrants for ‘taking their jobs.’ The leaders were able to get Richard II to draw up charters to allow the peasantry to self-govern in the King’s name, which felt like the 2010 Robin Hood movie where Robin Hood was a key figure in drawing up Magna Carta. This was ironic because in America, The Uprising was marketed as a Robin Hood movie, and its ending set up a Robin Hood-like figure.

The Uprising was aiming to be like other historical epics about revolutions, such as Spartacus and Braveheart. Like those films, The Uprising showed a small insurrection snowball into a wider act of rebellion. The difference was that those movies showed a longer build-up: Spartacus and William Wallace didn’t just see injustice and decide they needed to act; they experienced a lot of hardship before they snapped. The Uprising started with The Ploughman toiling in his fields, the council deciding to raise taxes, and The Ploughman starting the resistance when the taxman arrived in his village.

The screenplay felt like a first draft. Paul Greengrass wanted to show the major events with little connection. Important characters weren’t even given names. The Ploughman was just ‘The Ploughman’; he wasn’t called anything like Thomas of Ashdon or John Bond. The film had a cast of talented actors like Andrew Garfield, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jonny Lee Miller, but they had nothing to work with. They were just playing broad archetypes and acted as mouthpieces who had no characterisation whatsoever. The story had some major coincidences as well, like The Ploughman preventing a young man played by Sky Yang from being killed when collecting taxes in a small village; it turned out he was a scribe working for the King, and the rebels encounter Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterton), the King’s mother who was travelling from Canterbury to London.

The Uprising had so much potential since it was a story about the first major act of English radicalism. It was a story about two low-born men who were able to use their oratory and organisation skills to get the masses to strike at the heart of power. Even though the Peasants’ Revolt failed, in the long term it had ramifications like being the first step to the end of serfdom and allowing the English public to petition the people in power.

The Uprising was a film that did not live up to the promise of the history it was trying to portray. It suffered from an undercooked screenplay, which affected everything else.