Paul Greengrass's new film The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield, marks a rare moment in British cinema. The movie depicts the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, a pivotal event in English history that has gone largely untouched by filmmakers until now.
British film has long shown a peculiar appetite for stories of failure. Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and countless retellings of Captain Scott's failed Antarctic expedition demonstrate how the nation romanticises defeat and "pointless sacrifice." Yet this tendency stops at the door of revolution.
Unlike celebrated British films about military disasters and colonial setbacks, cinema has avoided depicting the nation's radical political movements. No major film exists about the 19th-century Chartist struggle for universal suffrage. The Peasants' Revolt, despite its historical importance, waited 645 years for a theatrical treatment.
The Uprising joins a small handful of films willing to show how the British state crushed radical collective action. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's 1975 Winstanley, Bill Douglas's 1986 Comrades (about the Tolpuddle Martyrs), and Mike Leigh's 2018 Peterloo represent the entire recent canon of films depicting failed British revolutions.
The gap reflects something deeper than simple box office calculation. While British culture venerates certain kinds of failure, it resists narratives where ordinary people challenge state power and lose. The nation's cinema embraces the tragedy of the individual soldier or explorer far more readily than it embraces the tragedy of collective resistance.
Greengrass's decision to adapt the Peasants' Revolt suggests a shift in what British filmmakers are willing to explore about their own history.