For crying out loud, it's a movie.

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2005)

This, like Braveheart, is a good entertaining movie, not a history lesson. It does capture the essence of feeling which history demonstrates was expressed in colonial America, complete with the reluctance of approximately 1/3 of the population to revolt and the outright opposition by another 1/3. I especially enjoy watching it after hearing the British press bash the US, or the French trying to cover up their culpability in so many underhanded schemes.
Many people posting here seem to take the popularity of this movie as a signal of hatred for the British. As an American, I do not hate the British. (I feel sorry for them that such a literate country can have a press as bad as, or worse than ours.) The revolution was 228 years ago, and a great deal of international cooperation has taken place since then between our countries since then.
Certainly we are upstarts, loud, cowboys and disobedient to British interests. We are mostly descendants of Christian zealots who left Europe due to the persecution our ancestors encountered there. As a descendant of puritans, Huguenots, German and Dutch reforms, I am forever grateful for what they have given me, and will strive to pass this on to my grandchildren. If this is misconstrued as hatred of the British, I would suggest that the hatred comes from the opposite side of the Atlantic. Hitler called us a mongrel nation - to this and current criticisms I reply, that's who we are, get over it.