The Patriot (2000 film) main subject American Revolutionary War
The Patriot is a 2000 American epic historical war film written by Robert Rodat, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Mel Gibson, Chris Cooper, Heath Ledger and Jason Isaacs. The story takes place mainly in rural Berkeley County in South Carolina and depicts Benjamin Martin (Gibson), an American colonist opposed to going to war with Great Britain who, along with his adult son (Ledger), gets swept into the Revolutionary War when his home life is disrupted and one of his sons is murdered by a cruel British officer (Isaacs). Rodat has said Martin is a composite character based on four historical men: Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan and Thomas Sumter.
Most of the film's events occur in the Southern theater of the war. Despite receiving generally positive reviews from critics, it was harshly criticized by British critics and historians and stirred controversy in the United Kingdom due to its themes of anti-British sentiment, its fictionalized portrayal of British figures and atrocities, including killing wounded soldiers and prisoners of war, the film's main villain shooting a child in cold blood and an ahistorical scene in which a church filled with colonists is locked and burned which was controversial due to it being similar to the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, a World War II war crime perpetrated by the Waffen-SS in June 1944. In his review of the film, critic Roger Ebert wrote, "None of it has much to do with the historical reality of the Revolutionary War".
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