Great patriotic film...

Rating: Null/10 (29 June 2000)

I found the Patriot to be a very exciting and moving film...I'm sure it will be passed over at Oscar time because of its similarity to Braveheart, and because it celebrates America (how dare we feel proud of our heritage?) I've noticed that the real bitterness towards this film comes from people who feel that it is revisionist history. As an American, I realize that the winners of the wars almost always skew the facts and figures in their favor (this includes the English, the French, the Germans...it is not merely an American fault). I'm not going to say that if you hate this film you're in the wrong because you're not patriotic, or un-American, but please have some respect for both sides of this great conflict. The British were by no means villains (perhaps King George was a bit of a jerk) but soldiers are by and large innocents in any war, fighting for causes that sometimes they don't even understand. It's strange that some of the viewers (at least I think they actually saw the movie) say the British were depicted as villains. Wrong. The scriptwriter, if anything, went out of his way to show that nearly every English soldier in the film were honorable and unwilling to commit atrocities...there was ONE villain, and he was viewed by his own allies as unstable and cruel. One final thought...there can be no accurate telling of any war in the end, and least not one with emotion. Both sides will always feel they were in the right, both sides will always want to tell their tale and deny all others. If England (or Canada, for that matter) wants to take a shot at filming the Revolutionary War in a "realistic" fashion (bearing in mind that they could not simply turn the tables and depict English soldiers as heroes and the colonists as monsters), they're welcome to try. I think that the English are just extremely bitter souls right now...think of everything they lost over the last 400 years...I'd probably be bitter too.