Historical hogwash

Rating: 1/10 (28 March 2011)

I'm an American, but I don't hold a grudge against the British.
But there are some people who hold grudges for decades, apparently including the director, Roland Emmerich, or for centuries, like the star, Mel Gibson. And some, sadly, hold grudges based on lies.
This movie is not about history; it is a grudge-fest based on lies.
The movie has a scene of the peaceful American townspeople, after being lured inside a church, being killed when the British set fire to the church.
I think that if anything like this had actually happened, I would have heard about it, particularly in my college course on the American Revolution. The British, and especially their German mercenaries, weren't saints, and neither were the Americans, but they were downright gentlemanly compared to the sadists portrayed in this anti-British propaganda.
I would chalk it up to just another bit of historical nonsense from the film industry if it weren't for Mel Gibson, who has a long track record of such historical garbage, or for the German director Roland Emmerich.
You see it was Nazi Germany that actually went around massacring whole villages in cold blood. The scene Emmerich portrayed in "The Patriot" actually corresponds fairly closely to what the German Wafen SS did at the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944. They lured all the women and children in the town into the church, and after they finished listening to the killing of all the town's men, the Germans killed everyone in the church. You can see pictures of what remains of the town on the internet.
This was not the only time Germans massacred entire towns in France; there were also Tulle, Ascq, Maillé, Robert-Espagne, and Clermont-en- Argonne. And Nazi Germany did the same in many other European countries and in the Soviet Union.
It seems Emmerich wants to create some equivalency between the British and the Germans by portraying an entirely fictional scene in a mostly- fictionalized movie about the American Revolution.
Sorry, Roland, but myth does not equal history. Neither the British nor any of the Allies went around killing entire towns out of revenge, or for pure sadistic pleasure, as the Nazis did.
Sadly, some viewers will come away believing the hogwash in "The Patriot" if they watch it. Your best bet: don't watch it.