The Patriot 2000
It seems like this one has largely been forgotten at this point. But I watched it tonight and was impressed. I had heard it was a weak imitator of Braveheart, but I liked it just as much. The family side of the movie was good and the fighting scenes were first rate. Though I don’t know that the British were quite as evil as they were portrayed here, the movie points out that most of the British (and loyalists) had a conscience, even though occasionally they would turn a blind eye to what was happening.
Towards the beginning of the movie I was seeing the Lethal Weapon 12 Mel Gibson, but he is enough of an actor that he shed that pretty quickly and became the character. He did a great job of being both intense and sensitive at the same time. The rest of the cast were all solid as well, and the cast is pretty big so that’s saying a lot.
The battle scenes were very good and, for the first time I remember, you could see the cannonballs rolling and bouncing through the lines, which is a lot closer to reality than the big explosions of a typical movie (though this one had a lot of those too). The DVD is nice because they talk about a lot of what they were showing in the battle scenes. The almost comic horror of lining up to shoot at each other is presented well, but you also see some of the strategy behind it, how the concentration of firepower could be so devastating and how a tight line of bayonettes would be hard to overcome.
It seems like when the movie came out that people complained about the absence of slavery in the South. Most people in the south didn’t own slaves and it was rare they had more than a couple. During the revolution period my understanding is that the slavery situation was better than it was years later. Many people believed in freedom for all men, though this conveniently was forgotten in the years after the war. Lastly, the big slave owners depended on the British as the market for their crops, so they were probably largely on the side of the status quo: the British. So I thought the treatment of slavery was acceptable, if a little soft.
Overall I saw few flaws in the movie and enjoyed it from start to finish.
I give it an A.
Written: 19 Dec 2000
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital