I really wanted to like The Uprising. Paul Greengrass directing a medieval historical epic about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, with Andrew Garfield leading a cast that includes Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Tom Hollander and Woody Norman, is an almost offensively good premise. Add the Black Death, class revolt, corrupt aristocrats, a teenage king and peasants deciding they've had quite enough of this nonsense, and you have the ingredients for something genuinely spectacular. Instead, I spent a surprisingly large portion of the film wondering whether everyone involved had collectively decided that mud is a substitute for character development.
This is an extremely muddy film. The fields are muddy. The roads are muddy. The clothes are muddy. The faces are muddy. The sky looks muddy. Andrew Garfield appears to have been personally introduced to every puddle in medieval England. And I understand what Greengrass is going for. He wants 1381 to feel physically miserable. England has been devastated by the Black Death; the surviving population is impoverished, workers are being squeezed by taxation, and the ruling class is determined to maintain its power. The ugliness of the environment is supposed to communicate the ugliness of the social order. The problem is that after approximately forty minutes, I understood. You can stop showing me mud now.
The historical backdrop is genuinely fascinating. The Peasants' Revolt emerged from a society already shattered by plague and economic upheaval, with the Crown imposing increasingly unpopular taxation while labourers were constrained by laws designed to prevent them from benefiting from the labour shortage. The result was an extraordinary popular uprising against the political and economic order. Greengrass is very good at staging collective violence. When the rebellion gathers momentum, there is an immediacy to the crowds, the movement and the sudden eruption of violence that feels distinctly his. His handheld camera places you in the middle of the chaos rather than observing it from a safe historical distance. Unfortunately, he also appears to believe that the camera should never stop moving.
There are moments when I genuinely wanted to grab the cinematographer by the shoulders and say, "It's okay. The camera can stand still. Nobody will take your Greengrass membership card away." The shaky-cam works during the battles. It makes the violence ugly and immediate. But when two people are having a conversation, and the camera behaves as though the field beneath them has suddenly become a trampoline, it stops creating immersion and starts creating motion sickness. The bigger problem, though, is the screenplay.
Andrew Garfield is giving this material everything he has. Unfortunately, the character he's playing is essentially Sad Medieval Man. His Ploughman has lost his wife and children to the plague, works land under an oppressive system, and initially has little interest in becoming a revolutionary. When a new poll tax becomes the final insult, he joins the growing rebellion and eventually becomes one of its central figures. Garfield plays him with sincerity and vulnerability. You can see the grief underneath the determination. You can see why he becomes increasingly invested in the rebellion. But the screenplay gives him very little beyond grief + anger + righteousness. For a film that wants this man to become the emotional face of a historical uprising, I needed considerably more of him.
Jamie Bell's John Ball and Cosmo Jarvis's Wat Tyler are more immediately interesting because their characters have clearer ideological and political identities. They represent different possibilities for what the uprising could become, and their disagreements introduce some much-needed complexity into a movement that might otherwise feel like one enormous angry crowd. The film is at its most interesting when the rebellion itself starts becoming difficult to control. Because that's the uncomfortable truth of revolutions: once you've convinced thousands of people to tear down the existing order, you don't automatically get to decide what they build afterward. Different factions want different things.
The political material is also much broader than it is deep. Greengrass clearly wants the film to resonate with contemporary audiences. The parallels between economic inequality, political distrust, and ordinary people feeling increasingly disconnected from powerful institutions are obvious. Several critics have noted the film's deliberate contemporary resonance. I don't object to that. Historical films don't need to pretend history has nothing to do with the present. But The Uprising sometimes makes the parallels so obvious that they stop feeling like thematic connections and start feeling like someone has written "THIS IS RELEVANT TO TODAY" in enormous letters across the screenplay. The historical material itself is interesting enough.
The depiction of King Richard II is one of the more intriguing elements. Woody Norman plays the young king as frightened, devout, and increasingly unstable, and there is something genuinely compelling about watching a teenager inherit an enormous political system that is already beginning to collapse around him. His scenes with the rebels have more tension than some of the film's supposedly grander sequences because there is genuine uncertainty about what he will do. And that is exactly what the film needs more of. Uncertainty. The best historical dramas don't simply tell you who the good people and bad people are. They show you why everyone thinks they're right. The Uprising occasionally does this. It just doesn't do it often enough.
Then there is the whole Robin Hood problem. The film has been marketed with an increasingly awkward connection to Robin Hood, despite the actual story being about the Peasants' Revolt. Garfield's Ploughman appears to draw partly on Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century poem containing one of the earliest textual references to Robin Hood, and the film's epilogue attempts to make the connection considerably more explicit. After spending more than two hours telling a fairly grim story about class revolt, historical violence and the complicated failure of an uprising, the film suddenly seems to remember that audiences like Robin Hood. So we get an awkward little gesture toward legend.
The film is so committed to grimness that it occasionally forgets that historical tragedy still requires characters we actually understand. There are moments of genuine power. The scale of the rebellion is impressive. The violence is visceral. Garfield is emotionally committed. The production design creates a convincing sense of medieval deprivation. And the basic story—a population devastated by disease and exploitation deciding that it has had enough—is inherently compelling. But The Uprising keeps getting in its own way. It has one of the most fascinating popular rebellions in English history, but repeatedly reduces its complexity into broad symbols. And it has a Robin Hood connection that feels like somebody added it during the final marketing meeting because apparently "1381 Peasants' Revolt" wasn't marketable enough. Still, I can't say I was bored throughout.
The action works. The atmosphere is convincing. The central historical conflict is genuinely interesting. And there are enough strong performances around Garfield to keep the film from collapsing completely under its own weight. Ordinary people looked at a political system that had demanded sacrifice from them while protecting those above them and decided they had reached the limit. That is powerful enough. Unfortunately, The Uprising spends too much time shouting that message while standing in a field of mud.
Final Score- [6/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times