Mort à la révolution! Why UK film loves a failed rebellion — SkimNews
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- Paul Greengrass's "The Uprising" (2026), starring Andrew Garfield, is the first British film to dramatize the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, in which rebels were slaughtered at London's Smithfield or returned home defeated to keep paying the poll tax.
- The film joins only a handful of British depictions of crushed uprisings — Winstanley (1975), Comrades (1986), and Peterloo (2018).
- The framing reduces the collective 1381 uprising to one fictional everyman, "Ploughman," who encounters boy king Richard II, rallies rebels, and scythes down enemies — a dramatisation the essay argues betrays the apostrophe in "Peasants' Revolt."
- US distributor Focus Features retitled the film "The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood," pitching it as the origin of that legend despite Robin Hood operating under kings who ruled roughly two centuries after the revolt.
- The essay draws a direct parallel between 1381 and 2026, citing a collapse in trust of rulers, a cost-of-living crisis, widening inequality, and political discourse dominated by lies.
- Historian Stephanie Barczewski, author of Heroic Failure and the British, attributes the country's celebration of military failure (Captain Scott, Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade) to a 19th-century private-school ethos of stoic Roman-inspired suffering.
Why it matters: The film puts the 1381 Peasants' Revolt on British screens for the first time, testing whether a politically radical collective struggle can survive a national cinematic preference for individual heroic narratives — and Focus Features' Robin Hood rebrand suggests US distributors will keep reshaping such stories to fit American freedom tropes.
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