Paul Greengrass\u2019s Peasants\u2019 Revolt epic, The Uprising, is just the latest in a long line of movies depicting an unsuccessful attempt at remaking the nation<\/p>\n
The British are perverse. We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners. We tell and retell, for instance, the story of Captain Scott even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to reach the south pole first to the unacceptably Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan\u2019s 2017 film Dunkirk typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat. And then there was the tragicomic disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the 1853-56 Crimean war in which our boys raced to putatively glorious if stupid deaths. It\u2019s as if, for us British, pointless sacrifice and embracing failure are what heroism means. And our cinema has colluded with this perversity.<\/p>\n
But there is an exception to this national veneration of failure. Britain has been reluctant to embrace its revolutionary defeats. There is, for instance, no film dealing with the Chartist movement\u2019s 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage. Even more strikingly yet, it is only now, in 2026, that a film has been made about the calamitous 1381 Peasants\u2019 Revolt, even though it is a pivotal event in British history. Paul Greengrass\u2019s The Uprising<\/a>, starring Andrew Garfield as a \u2013 let\u2019s just get this over with \u2013 revolting peasant, joins a mere handful of other movies, including Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo\u2019s 1975 Winstanley<\/a>, Bill Douglas\u2019s 1986 Comrades<\/a> and Mike Leigh\u2019s 2018 Peterloo<\/a>, that dare depict how radical collective action was crushed by a ruthless state.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/843e6b588aa6ef42c31fc93385670ff5d136b377\/848_0_4219_3375\/master\/4219.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a4aa5eef8bd9738e09b96d170fcbf017\" "\\"Mort")
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"