When The Uprising ended, I burst into giggles. The friend I’d gone to see it with sat in stunned silence. The couple sitting to our left murmured something about Robin Hood and left. I assaulted them with playful banter as they tried to leave. Then, I concocted the title for my review as I cackled on the drive home.
AAAAAAHHHHHHH
Where to begin, where to begin. What a slog. What. A. Slog. Let me explain in a way that probably won’t help: I don’t like candy. I don’t like sweets. I don’t like cake, ice cream, or pastries. Sometimes I’ll spring for a chocolate chip cookie. My coffee is the sweetest thing I have most days. Sometimes it’s my Vitamin D gummies if I get two red ones. Ugh. Gross. I will not be explaining the “why” and “what’s wrong with me” behind this behavior. However, I understand that sugary snacks give a nice dopamine boost. The Uprising was so bad that halfway into the film, I ducked out to the lobby, picked the least gross candy (Buncha Crunch), and ingested the chemical concoction masquerading as sugar at specific intervals to stave off my sheer boredom.
I hope this gives some context and, perhaps, spoils my rating for this film. I don’t care.
Hey, remember when we watched those Jason Bourne movies and they were really cool but the camera wouldn’t stop fucking moving and it was really annoying? Then everyone else started doing it because they didn’t understand it and it led to this shit:
Well the master is back. The same guy who did it in Jason Bourne is the same guy who concocted The Uprising. Lots of shaky cam. It never stops. So much so that it actually became difficult to focus on what was happening, and I wished, desperately, to be able to hit pause and look at a wall for a while. Absolute chaos. I recommend dramamine.
To add to that chaos was the fact that this movie is based on the real-life Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and features actual people from that event. And so, captured in the visual mayhem of the camera is the visual mayhem of people running around and screaming. Actual plot happens during these rebellions, and there’s stuff that people are doing and deciding things during these scenes. So how do you visually depict plot and conversation that happens during an active revolt? Do you find some way to frame your actors and mix the audio so we can hear them speak? Do you cut out dialogue altogether and let the motion be clear and easy to follow? Maybe you do a heist-like voiceover explaining the plan as you see it unfold.
Nah.
Screaming.
Lotta screaming.
I tell you, those actors were consuming a pound of cough drops between takes. For half dozen or so action scenes, in every single one, someone or another is screaming and yelling and you can barely hear them and can barely tell who’s saying what. It went from “ok, I think I understand the urgency of this” to “please stop screaming” to “oh jeez, someone forced a fuckton of ADR in post, didn’t they?” So much screaming. It was like an episode of Ed, Edd, n Eddy.
OOOOØOÓFFFF
Another thing that baffled me about this film was just how seriously it took itself. There’s a large amount of adult themes throughout The Uprising to give the film a bit of gravitas. That’s not like, the worst thing. Beheadings, massacres of unarmed civilians, soldiers sexually assaulting women. You gotta paint the picture. But uh… I think someone needed to ask Greengrass to read his dialogue scenes out loud before deciding to film them.
One of the opening scenes is of the evil council people deliberating on taxes and state income. It’s a reasonable issue to have, and sets up their disdain for the merchant character that comes up later in the movie. The scene was on par with all the political exposition scenes from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Just thoroughly lazy. The friend I saw this movie with said it points to the way movies are dumbing themselves down because they don’t think audiences can handle anything too complex.
What’s worse is that they had a lot of weird, foreign accents, and they barely made an effort to make them more accessible to us normal people. I’m talking about strong Scottish and Irish accents delivering key pieces of information that… like… c’mon y’all. Don’t be spoiling my sweet tea. So when we get a Doomsday flashbang reference, I wish even more desperately that I could pause, rewind 5 seconds, turn on the subtitles, and try again.
So there is a stupid reference to feudal laws and politics regarding a treaty that bound peasants to land, didn’t let them practice capitalism, yadda yadda, and their rebellion wanted to undo that treaty. I say stupid reference not because the reference was stupid, but the way they reference this bit of information was done stupidly. Does that make sense?
To further explain, there is a real-life “Doomsday Book” and it is boring unless you’re writing an essay for 7th grade history. It’s in this movie. You see it. That’s why my title is what it is. Clickbait. Yes. Moving on.
I GUEEEEEEEEESSSS?
The Uprising is not all bad, though. I liked the sense of scale of things. I liked when the big armies moved and formed and joined and outclassed the armored soldiers. There are no big battles. No army versus army fights. Just masses of peasants who loot and sack government buildings. But it was still cool. They had a “Fires of Gondor”-style lighting of pyres that raised an eyebrow but it’s acceptable. I consider it an unearned allusion to a far superior swords and sandals epic.
One thing I didn’t really buy or understand was a sudden gust of religious motivation and dialogue in the middle chunk of the film. Religion didn’t really play a part in this rebellion, nor was it impactful in the ending. I understand that part of the promise made to the rebels from their leaders was that “the King agreeing to our demands is a holy miracle”, and when the king rejects them, it’s supposed to be blasphemous. Or something. There was way too much God talk. I was worried this movie was turning into a Jesus Trojan Horse.
Oh also, Andrew Garfield is in this. He plays “brooding reluctant hero with dead wife and an unexplained ability to fight”. His catalyst to action was disjointed and flimsy. He broods so poorly. He should smile more. They also made Thomasin McKenzie shave her head for this crap, which I think was the movie’s greatest sin.
I rate The Uprising
BAD
I saw The Uprising in theaters.
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