Jonathan Millar 
Anil Krishna 
James Oconner 
The Uprising: Paul Greengrass’s Medieval Revolt Epic Starring Andrew Garfield
© Focus Features
There’s a small moment in Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising that says quite a lot about what the movie is trying to do. The camera pauses on a bundle of royal parchments, still sealed with wax, as they slowly catch fire. It isn’t some huge action scene or dramatic speech, but the image sticks with you. Those papers represent the people in charge, the rules they’ve made, and the ordinary people who are getting crushed underneath all of it. For a movie about a revolt, it’s a pretty fitting image.
Plot and Setting
After News of the World and The Lost Bus, Greengrass goes back to England for a story based on the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It’s not exactly surprising territory for a filmmaker who likes putting ordinary people in the middle of huge, frightening events. The difference here is the period setting, but Greengrass still shoots it in the way you’d expect from him, with handheld cameras, quick cuts and a constant sense that something is about to go badly wrong.
The anger behind the revolt is easy to understand. England has been battered by the Black Death, people are struggling to survive, and then there’s an increasingly oppressive tax system that seems designed to make life harder for everyone except the wealthy. Andrew Garfield plays a peasant who has already lost his family to the plague and has very little left to lose. He doesn’t exactly wake up one morning wanting to become the face of a rebellion, either. He gets pushed into that position, and Garfield plays him as a quiet, fairly ordinary man whose strength comes from the way he thinks rather than from giving big speeches.
That approach works, although it also makes his character a little harder to grab onto at times. Garfield is deliberately restrained, while Jamie Bell and Cosmo Jarvis get roles that are more immediately noticeable. There are stretches where you almost wish Garfield’s character would take up a little more space, especially when the film is surrounded by louder personalities.
The Emotional Centerpiece
Even with those slower patches, The Uprising eventually finds its rhythm. The big turning point is the confrontation between King Richard II and the rebels, and this is where the movie starts to feel much more like the Greengrass film you were probably expecting. There’s a real sense of danger in the scene, but it also gives Garfield’s character a tragic weight that hasn’t always been there earlier in the story.
This is also where the movie starts reaching for the same kind of intensity Greengrass has managed in films like Bloody Sunday and United 93, as well as his work on the Jason Bourne movies. It’s not quite as consistently powerful as those films, but the filmmaking has that familiar urgency. The camera keeps moving, people are shouting, plans are changing, and it feels like everything could fall apart at any second.
Greengrass also gets good work out of the supporting cast. Jamie Bell and Cosmo Jarvis are both strong, while Thomasin McKenzie brings plenty of energy to her role. Katherine Waterston is another standout, particularly as the King’s mother, giving the political side of the story a little more personality than it might otherwise have had.
A Past That Mirrors the Present
Under all the fighting and medieval chaos, The Uprising is really a political movie. The Peasants’ Revolt gives Greengrass a way to talk about things that obviously aren’t limited to the 14th century: the gap between rich and poor, people feeling ignored by those in power, and the frustration that comes when the people making decisions seem completely removed from the consequences.
That modern comparison is pretty obvious, sometimes almost too obvious. The movie occasionally slows down when it should be pushing forward, and some of the familiar rebellion-movie beats make parts of the story feel less surprising than they could have been. Still, Greengrass knows how to keep a large-scale story moving, and even when The Uprising gets uneven, it rarely becomes boring.
It’s not the most polished or perfectly paced film Greengrass has made, and some of its political ideas are hammered home a little harder than necessary. But there’s something effective about watching a filmmaker take a revolt from hundreds of years ago and make it feel uncomfortably recognizable. The Uprising may have a few rough edges, but the anger at its center is hard to miss, and that’s ultimately what makes the movie work.
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