Entertaining movie about the Revolutionary War

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2020)

The Patriot is a good Revolutionary War movie but it is fiction.
The story follows Benjamin Martin, a farmer in South Carolina with a checkered past whose perfect life comes crashing down in the turmoil of the American Revolutionary War. When a brutal British dragoon officer, Colonel Tavington shots one of Martin's sons in cold blood and torches his home he seeks revenge by joining a local militia. As Martin's militia disrupt British supply lines, Tavington resorts to sadistic acts of cruelty against civilians until Martin and Tavington do battle.
Excellent costumes, acting, and the fact that it really is the only war movie depicting the Revolutionary War make it worth watching.
The biggest grip with this movie is the historical inaccuracies. What makes it worse are that Martin and Tavington are loosely based on real people ("the Swamp Fox" and Colonel Tarelton). First it is a movie so let's just calm down. However some of the scenes are so inaccurate it is disgusting. The fact that his African American workers are "freemen" and they eventually hang out with other free slaves is odd. Slavery was common in the South so dont sugarcoat it.
The second topic of controversy involves supposed British atrocities especially the scene with the church. This gets the Brits in a tizzy as there are no records of British troops killing civilians in that manner. But let's not try and dim the real atrocities committed by British and allied troops and the effect it had on the American people at the time (Americans were not angels at the time either). Between 1.5 and 3% of the American population died in that war (not including civilians). Civilians, like in all wars, were murdered by enemy troops albeit not on orders from high command. Homes were ransacked regularly and put to the torch. For example, Norfolk VA and Portland ME were both bombarded and torched by the British. British and their Indian allies massacred 300 American civilians at the Battle of Wyoming, 12,000+ American POWs died on British hulk ships of deprevation and disease with a death rate in excess of American POWs in WWII. More than 100,000 Americans became refugees and fled to Canada after the war. To put these numbers in perspective, that would be equivalent to the US today losing 5 to 10 million military members, 1.5 million in POW camps, having San Francisco and Seattle completely destroyed and losing 15 to 20 million people as political refugees. This war affected Americans like no other including WWII and the Civil War. Virtually everyone in the country came into contact with enemy troops, every state had battles and suffered occupation. This is not to say the British like Nazis but the horrors of war were there as they were in most wars of the 18th century in some form or another (the Seven Years War AKA French and Indian War in the US featured plenty of horrors in Europe and America). For many Americans at the time this war uprooted their whole lives and if Hollywood needed to portray that by exaggerating a single British officer's acts and the nature of war in general so be it.