Even when it’s set in the 14th century, you instantly know a Paul Greengrass film. The kinetic charge the director gave Captain Phillips and the Bourne movies now crackles through his new project, The Uprising. What might be less familiar is the English history it is rooted in. The story is a fictionalised retelling of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. The moment has rarely been put before the camera — or allowed to disturb the popular idea of Englishness as quaintly immune to revolution.
We open in Essex under thundery skies. An unnamed ploughman (Andrew Garfield) works the earth. Nearby, his family lie buried after the plague. The casting might seem counterintuitive: Garfield is not an obvious son of the soil. But the aura of heartbreak he brings the role is well judged. The character’s loss is a building block in the making of a renegade. Because after death come taxes, brutally levied on the poor by advisers to the adolescent Richard II (Woody Norman).
Confrontation sparks conflagration. An angry but hopeful mass marches on London. There is much modern resonance. Centuries later, another Poll Tax did for Margaret Thatcher; appeals for “fair wages and rents” may speak loudly to the young of 2026. (Serfs in sackcloth became a comic staple for Monty Python, but I found myself thinking of Belgian-French director Agnès Varda’s remark about the crowds in the 19th-century films of the Lumière brothers. Rather than ancestors, she said, “they are us.”)
Yet The Uprising also spotlights the leaders of the revolt, and their medieval context. Cosmo Jarvis is stolid ex-soldier Wat Tyler; Jamie Bell plays fervent preacher John Ball. For all their radicalism, they share a faith in the goodness of royalty. “We’ll see,” another character says.
In the US, the film was sold as a Robin Hood origin story. It isn’t, though poetic licence does come into play. Hard truths too. This being a Greengrass movie, both come framed with expert, hurly-burly action sequences. And The Uprising becomes something all the director’s own: an underseen chapter from the true story of England, given the status of an epic.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from October 9 and in US cinemas now