Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (2 November 2000)

Nearly all of the comments posted here address the issue of the historical inaccuracies that run rampant throughout The Patriot. The film's detractors attack the loose approach Emmerich and Devlin have taken with regard to American history, while fans of the movie dismiss the inaccuracies and say that the film never tried to follow the history books. My theory is that, if the movie had been good enough to justify taking those liberties, no one would ever even mention them. Rarely does anyone complain about the inaccuracies of Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart, Apocalypse Now, Lawrence of Arabia, or any of the other great historical period films, because those movies are effective enough to make such historical goofs irrelevant. The Patriot, by contrast, is set right here in America, in a time period that nearly all of us have learned about in school, so the inaccuracies are bound to be noticed. But even without going to school, any thinking viewer will easily see that no real war has ever been this cleanly divided between Good and Evil. It's painfully obvious that the colonists weren't really that lovable and virtuous, and that the British were not as hissably evil or comically formal as they are in this film. This isn't some fantasy like Independence Day or Godzilla, this is a movie that tries to be about a real event that took place and involved real people who fought and died for what they believed. I think it really is a sign of a bad film when it tries to depict real historical events, and ends up being even less believable than ID4. One more minor quibble-- the movie gives us no sense of geography. We never know where the hell any of the screen action is taking place once things really get going; wouldn't it have been more effective to give us an idea of the real places, many of which still exist today, where this struggle took place?