Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising opens on a mud-caked farmer whose name we never learn. He is called Ploughman — “I am what I do” — and he is standing over the graves of a wife and children taken by the Black Death. Justin Chang’s review for The New Yorker reads the film against the history it dramatizes, and against the promise Andrew Garfield made on its behalf: that any billionaires watching would be “scared shitless.”

The 1381 setting the film reconstructs:

  • The plague had killed roughly half of England, leaving the survivors in socioeconomic ruin
  • Richard II was fourteen and feckless; his councillors, short of money after a long war with France, taxed the Church and merchants not at all and the peasants to the hilt, since the peasants had no leverage
  • The rebels marched on London to petition for lower taxes, better wages, and the abolition of serfdom, turning scythes and sickles into weapons
  • They dropped reflexively to their knees whenever the king appeared, because they genuinely believed God had empowered him to rule

The best thing Chang finds in the film is its interest in the logistics of revolt: rebel leaders who seldom agree on tactics, councillors scheming to keep an unpredictable boy king pliable, and real suspense over whether the petition would be heard at all. The king grants the demands and charters are drafted county by county — and then John Ball, a heretic priest played by Jamie Bell, demands the heads of the treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The film doesn’t mourn them, Chang notes, but it suggests the rebels, in giving themselves to bloodlust, set themselves up for the same fate.

His complaint is craft, not ideology. The Uprising keeps being compared to Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002), where the convulsive handheld camera arose from the material and history seemed to be forged on the fly. Here, nothing is discovered spontaneously; every formation and glance looks pre-composed, and drone shots of London keep yanking the viewer out of the maelstrom. Greengrass, Chang says, appears to be juicing a straightforward period piece with an imported layer of realist immediacy.

Then there’s the marketing muddle, which is a story in itself. The US distributor put out a trailer titled “The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood,” while the UK distributor denied any Robin Hood connection at all — the legend belongs to the era of Richard the Lionheart, nearly two centuries earlier. Greengrass’s project was first announced in 2022 as “The Hood,” and the finished film’s coda has Ploughman masked in filthy green rags at the head of an army of archers anyway.

Chang’s judgment is that whatever resonance the film achieves comes from beyond the frame: an American audience impatient, if the recent democratic-socialist winds mean anything, for sweeping political and economic change. The pity is that a movie so eager to have us baying for blood mostly leaves us scratching our heads.