Product Description

When the British arrive at his South Carolina home, French and Indian War hero Benjamin Martin takes up arms again to protect his family after swearing off violence and fighting.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-MAR-2007
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1030 in DVD
• Brand: GIBSON,MEL
• Released on: 2000-10-24
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 165 minutes

Amazon.com
Aimed directly at a mainstream audience, The Patriot qualifies as respectable entertainment, but anyone expecting a definitive drama about the American Revolution should look elsewhere. Rising above the blatant crowd pleasing of Stargate, Independence Day, and Godzilla, director Roland Emmerich crafts a marvelous re-creation of South Carolina in the late 1770s (aided immeasurably by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), and Robert Rodat's screenplay offers the same balance of epic scale and emotional urgency that elevated his earlier script for Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, Emmerich embraces clichés and hackneyed melodrama that a more gifted director would have avoided. Instead of attempting a truly great film about the most pivotal years of American history, Emmerich settles for a standard revenge plot with the Revolutionary War as an incidental backdrop.

On those terms, the film is engrossing and sufficiently intelligent, especially when militia leader Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) cagily negotiates with British General Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson) in one of the most rewarding scenes. For the most part, the story concerns Martin's anguished quest for revenge against ruthless redcoat Colonel Tavington (played with snide relish by Jason Isaacs), and the rise to manhood of Martin's eldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), whose battlefield honor exceeds even that of his brutally volatile father. At its best, The Patriot conveys the horror of war among innocent civilians, and the epic battle scenes, while by no means masterful, are graphically intense and impressive. And although Ledger's love interest (Lisa Brenner) is too bland to register much emotion, the focus on family (which frequently relegates the war to background history) provides a suitable vehicle for Gibson, who matches his achievement in Braveheart with an effectively brooding performance. --Jeff Shannon

Additional Features
Like the movie itself, there's little in the supplementary materials for The Patriot that requires more than one viewing, but they're interesting while they last. "The Art of War" featurette purports to be a study of the film's elaborate battle logistics, but it offers only a cursory appreciation of sequence planning and stunt work. The "True Patriots" featurette is much better, examining the painstaking efforts toward authenticity in production design, artillery, and costuming. The visual effects featurette offers a study of several pivotal shots, displayed in triptych fashion (to show how effects are layered together from separate elements) and narrated by visual effects supervisor Stuart Robertson. Generous photo galleries are included, featuring shots of the primary cast, sets, and costumes (the last matched by a gallery of conceptual drawings), and the feature-length commentary by director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin is worthwhile, if not altogether essential. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Worth a watch
I love the movie and have the DVD, but just wasn't motivated enough to watch it again. This is a chance when you change your stock to blue ray, you do want to watch them again and appreciate them more. After all the movie looks more stunning than ever.

Formula plot, but well played and acted.
The plot of PATRIOT follows the formula of the reluctant warrior who is forced to fight by circumstances--see SHENANDOAH and others. True to the formula, once he enters the war, he is unstoppable. Even though it is strictly a formula plot, Mel Gibson and an excellent cast pull it off. Heath Ledger is excellent as the son who must fight despite his father's warning, and Jason Isaacs is wonderfully mean as the brutal British officer.

What happened to historical accuracy?
Visually impressive but Gibson reprises his sensitive hero shtick. In the movie the British kill injured American troops, Gibson offers to free the slaves if they will fight for
the Revolution and the British burn civilians in a church. HOWEVER, in reality the only documented massacre of injured soldiers was BY the rebels OF loyalist troops, the British offered to free the slaves, a move received with outrage among the slave owning rebels (including Washington and Jefferson)and the burning of civilians in a church by British troops never took place (although the Germans did do this in France during the Second World War).