War is a grotesque and brutal business, in which nobody really wins.
But it has a slightly more sober spirit, a more composed atmosphere of beauty and tragedy, than Emmerich's manic earlier films, which typically give you no time to breathe, except during the platitudinous monologues. As a compelling and immensely detailed portrait of life and death in a vastly different America, and a wrenching depiction of early modern warfare at its cruelest, it provides the American Revolution with the epic film it has long deserved. Most moviegoers, I suppose, don't need to be sold on Gibson as a leading man. But for me, at least, the finely controlled emotion of his work here as Benjamin Martin is something of a revelation. Now a conspicuously middle-aged man with a furrowed visage and a thickening frame, Gibson makes a completely convincing South Carolina gentleman farmer who, despite his mysterious military past, only wants to gather his family close around him as the war clouds thicken over the American horizon.