There is much rabbling and rousing—as well as copious amounts of bloodlust–in The Uprising, a dramatization of a peasants’ revolt in 1381 England that doubles as a brooding Robin Hood prequel. But to what end? Andrew Garfield plays Ploughman, a farmer mourning the death of his family in the wake of the plague who gets caught up in the insurrection. He’s meant to be the movie’s moral center, something of a middle ground between the elitist council of the feckless king (Woody Norman) and the bloodthirsty rioters who unleash indiscriminate terror. As Garland portrays him, however, Ploughman is a limp presence (and, in the many instances where he inflicts his own violence with a cool, curved blade, a hypocritical one). Inherently a political movie, The Uprising muddles its own politics in dangerous ways. In a weird display of bothsidesism, there are references to “no kings” and “deplorables.” Meanwhile, the scenes of masked peasants storming royal offices to burn documents and cathedrals to destroy gilded ornaments recalls the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. Perhaps more pertinent to the movie’s setting, it was also difficult not to think of the recent march of masked, far-right, anti-immigrant agitators in Dover, England. This is not to suggest that The Uprising means to support those “uprisings.” It’s worth noting that writer-director Paul Greengrass, best known for Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne films, broke out with 2002’s Bloody Sunday, a dramatization of the 1972 Irish civil rights protest that was violently quelled by British troops. Yet just as Greengrass’ penchant for shaky, docu-style cinematography falls too often into chaos in The Uprising, the movie’s intentions are jostled into meaninglessness, at best, and manipulability at worst. It’s easy to imagine this being screened at that rally on Jan. 6.
(9/10/2026)
