The Uprising and Britain’s missing films about failed revolutions

The Guardian has published a feature on Paul Greengrass’s new film The Uprising, a drama about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt starring Andrew Garfield. The piece uses the film to ask why British cinema has so rarely told the stories of the country’s failed revolutions, and it argues that the film itself is weakened by Hollywood conventions.

What happened

The Guardian says it has taken until 2026 for a film to be made about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, even though it calls the uprising a pivotal event in British history. The Uprising is directed by Paul Greengrass. Andrew Garfield plays a fictional character called Ploughman, and the historian Dan Jones is named as the film’s historical adviser.

The feature’s main argument is that the British like to celebrate heroic failures, such as Captain Scott’s death in Antarctica in 1912, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war of 1853 to 1856, and the story told in Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk. According to The Guardian, failed revolutions are the exception. The paper notes there is no film about the Chartist movement’s 19th-century campaign for universal suffrage. It names only a handful of British films that show radical collective action being crushed by the state: Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley (1975), Bill Douglas’s Comrades (1986) and Mike Leigh’s Peterloo (2018).

The article cites Stephanie Barczewski, author of Heroic Failure and the British. It links the national taste for glorious disaster to the 19th-century private school ethos of stoic duty, a model that revolutionary failure does not fit. It then contrasts Britain with other countries. American films about the war of independence go back to the silent era. The French were filming their 1789 revolution as early as the 1913 biopic Robespierre. Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov made October in 1928, and Irish history has been dramatised in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) and Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006).

The Guardian credits The Uprising as a bold attempt to show a collective uprising without conventional heroism. It follows how rebels from Kent and Essex rose against the poll tax, split into factions, and were outmanoeuvred by the boy king Richard II, ending either slaughtered at Smithfield in London or back at home. However, the paper criticises the decision to tell this collective story through one invented man. It also criticises a closing section in which Ploughman and surviving rebels become an outlaw band in the greenwood, which casts the revolt as an origin story for Robin Hood. The Guardian points out that the Robin Hood legend belongs to a period about 200 years earlier. It also reports that Focus Features, the film’s US distributor, retitled it The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood earlier this year.

Why it matters if you live in United Kingdom

For newcomers, the feature is a useful guide to parts of British history that rarely appear on screen. Several of the events it mentions took place in places you may live near or visit:

• Smithfield, London: The Guardian notes this is where many rebels of 1381 were killed and where Wat Tyler was murdered by Richard II’s men. William Wallace, the subject of Braveheart, was also executed there.
• St George’s Hill, near Weybridge, Surrey: According to the article, this is where the Diggers, a group of proto-communists led by Gerrard Winstanley, settled common land during the English civil war before local gentry violently evicted them. The Guardian contrasts this with a £25m mansion listed on Rightmove on the same hill today.
• Kent and Essex: The article says the 1381 rebels came from these counties.

The piece also ties the film to current life in Britain. The Guardian says Greengrass wanted the story to resonate today, and it lists a collapse in trust in rulers, a long cost of living crisis, widening inequality and dishonest political debate as reasons why 2026 resembles 1381. Anyone trying to understand British debates about class, tax and protest may find that framing helpful.

For film fans, the article works as a viewing list. Beyond The Uprising, it mentions Cromwell (1970), To Kill a King (2003), Peterloo and Winstanley, which it calls perhaps the greatest film about British revolutionary failure. The Guardian does not give UK release dates, cinemas, ticket prices or streaming details for The Uprising, so check local listings for screening information.

What to watch next

The main question is how audiences respond to a film that The Guardian describes as an important but belated, improbable and commercially dubious addition to the national story. The US retitling to stress the Robin Hood link shows the distributor sees that legend as a selling point. Whether the UK release uses the same framing is not stated in the source.

Historical accuracy is another likely point of debate. The Guardian has already questioned how a fictional hero can appear at so many key moments of the revolt, and it suggests the film’s historical adviser may object. Expect historians and critics to keep discussing this as more people see the film.

More broadly, the article makes the case that Britain’s radical history remains largely absent from its cinema. The paper notes that the English civil war, which it calls the one successful military revolution in British history, has also been poorly served on screen. If The Uprising finds an audience, it could encourage more films about these periods, though the source makes no prediction on that.

Source: The Guardian