Revisioning the American Revolution in the Era of the Hollywood ‘Blockbuster’

Abstract

It is a curious anomaly that an event which occupies such a sanctified position in the meta-narrative of American history — what Simon Newman refers to in his introduction as ‘a beacon for others around the world committed to a republican form of government’ — should have been so resolutely overlooked by the majority of Hollywood filmmakers.1 Indeed, while Americans and Europeans alike have learned about the United States from films about the conquest of the West, the Civil War, the Second World War and Vietnam, the American Revolution has been routinely ignored by Hollywood. Since the United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, only two major films have been made, or at least partly financed by Hollywood, which feature the events of the Revolution in a meaningful way: Hugh Hudson’s ill-fated Revolution (1985), a film whose abject box office performance effectively bankrupted its British production company Goldcrest, and Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000), a star-driven ‘blockbuster’ film made by the production team also responsible for Independence Day (1996) and Godzilla (1998).