Well, I wondered what Roland and Ute Emmerich and Dean Devlin would come up with next from Centropolis. In 1994 it was Stargate, in 1996 Independence Day, in 1997 Godzilla, and in 1998 the underrated The 13th Floor. This year they join forces with Mel Gibson for The Patriot, a war movie about that most underreported of conflicts, the War of the Revolution, apparently taking their cues from Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, one of the first of the modern guerrilla warriors.

Gibson is Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina farmer, who got (and apparently gave) his fill of war fighting the French and Cherokee for the British a decade or so earlier. Now he is a widower with six, or maybe seven — I lost count — children, ranging from his eighteen-year-old son Gabriel (Heath Ledger), hot to join the continental army and fight the British, to speechless little three-year-old Susan, and while he believes in independence for the Colonies, he does not believe — perhaps from personal experience — that war is the way to get it. In fact, when the South Carolina Colonial Assembly votes on whether or not to provide the Continentals with a levy, Martin warns that the war will not be fought on sanitized battlefields but will come into their very homes. And it does come, right into his own home, when, after a battle fought in his backyard, Colonel of Dragoons William Tavington (Jason Isaacs) finds him treating the wounded of both sides and, after having the British wounded removed and the colonial wounded summarily shot, orders Martin’s home burnt and Gabriel taken to be hanged, and then shoots another son. At which point, the reluctant Martin decides to go to war, but in a different way from the one by which General Gates has succeeded in getting most of the Continentals in the South massacred. His job: to tie down Cornwallis’s army in South Carolina until promised aid arrives from France.

Most of the story revolves around Martin’s guerrilla war against the British and his feud with Tavington, who, despised by the genteel Lord Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), is nevertheless used by him to take the onus of committing various atrocities off the “honorable” General’s back. Much of the film, in fact, deals with such atrocities, of which everyone — including Martin himself — seems to have been guilty at one time or another.

The film leads up to a climax that is particularly spectacular — and surprising, given Martin’s own views on the correct strategy for winning a war.

Beautiful South Carolina countryside. Lots of action. Scenes played to yank at the heartstrings (Martin carrying the colonial flag into battle). Musical score by the inimitable John Williams. On the downside: occasional pacing problems (the film could have lost half an hour out of its approximately 2 hours 40 minutes of running time without harming the plot), lots and lots of blood and gore (cannonballs seem to be particularly good at taking off heads and legs). A note at the end tells us that all scenes in which animals were shown in harm’s way were simulated, but it says nothing similar for the human actors; maybe it was all CGI (I suspect that large parts of the set-piece battle scenes, with their huge armies marching toward each other, were computer-generated).

Despite the length, I enjoyed it. So did much of the rest of the audience; there was a fair amount of applause — to which, I have to confess it, I contributed. This was a good movie to start off the Fourth of July weekend.

(Perhaps it will start a trend. One of the trailers was for a new Jerry Bruckheimer spectacular coming out next Memorial Day — Pearl Harbor.)

Postnote (written several days after I originally wrote this review):

Yesterday, while sitting at my computer with my back to the TV, I got to hear much of The History Channel’s Independence Day (one day early) presentation of The American Revolution, and was struck by a couple of descriptions, one of a person and one of a battle, which corresponded very closely to the film.

William Tavington, the dragoon commander who is the movie’s villain, appears to have been modelled on one Lt.-Col. Banastre Tarleton. Tarleton was the English commander of the British Legion, a group of Tory cavalrymen associated with Cornwallis during his southern campaign, who were not overscrupulous when it came to observing the niceties of war. Tarleton appears to have been an early version of a later war’s J. E. B. Stuart, but without Stuart’s saving graces.

The climactic battle in which Martin and Tavington eventually come to blows appears to have been based on the Cowpens — tactics and outcome are quite similar. Martin’s personal battle with Tavington is mirrored in the real world by a personal fight between Lt.-Col. William Washington (cousin of the better-known George) and Tarleton; however, Tarleton seems to have been a bit luckier than his motion-picture persona in the outcome, and even Washington comes away considerably less bloodied than Mel Gibson.

Descriptions of both Tarleton and the Cowpens can be found in the second volume of Christopher Ward’s The War of the Revolution (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1952).