A good movie, not a history lesson

Rating: Null/10 (28 February 2002)

I have a couple of things i would like to say. Firstly, i have read quite a few of the other reviews here to get a feel of what people thought about this movie, and i am appalled to say that quite a lot of people seem to think that Britain and Scotland are two different countries. Scotland is in Britain, people, its that sticky-out part at the top. Scots ARE British, although a lot of us don't like that fact and would rather be considered Scots before we were considered British. (I'm not talking about everybody here though). Secondly, many of the reviews list all of the historical inaccuracies in this film. It is clear that there are many of these as we can see from the other reviews (i think someone even said that Edinburgh was an English town that the Scots took over? This is nonsense as far as i know - Edinburgh has always been in Scotland! I live there!) Yes, Murron was not the name of Wallace's wife (it was Marion), and yes, the French princess and Wallace never did have an affair and probably never actually met at all, and yes, Wallace did commit his fair share of atrocities against English people too, and yes, he was not a commoner etc etc etc i could go on, but this is not meant to be a lesson in Scots history, and neither is the movie. It never claims to be anything other than it is; a piece of entertainment. It's an enjoyable movie for the most part, although some of the dodgy Scots accents are questionable and sound more like Northern Irish to me, but on the whole, it's an emotional and well directed film. The musical score is excellent too. One small grievance though - after the film was released, they put up a hideous statue in Stirling, supposed to be William Wallace, but it looked exactly like Mel Gibson! Well, it gave us something to laugh at anyway! Well, i'll read some of the other reviews and see if i can find any others written by Scots to see what they think. Bye for now.