Mel Gibson The Patriot

The Patriot is a 2000 American epic historical war movie with Mel Gibson, Chris Cooper, Heath Ledger, and Jason Isaacs in it. It was written by Robert Rodat and directed by Roland Emmerich. The story is primarily set in rural Berkeley County in South Carolina and follows Benjamin Martin (Gibson), an American colonist who opposed going to war with Great Britain. When his home life is upended and one of his sons is brutally murdered by a British officer (Isaacs), Benjamin Martin and his adult son (Ledger) are drawn into the Revolutionary War. According to Rodat, Martin is a composite figure based on four real-life individuals: Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, and Daniel Morgan.

The majority of the movie’s action takes place in the war’s Southern theatre. Despite Although it received generally favourable reviews, British critics and historians harshly criticised it and it caused controversy in the UK because of its anti-British themes, its fictionalised portrayals of British figures and atrocities, such as the killing of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war, the film’s main villain shooting a child in cold blood, and an ahistorical scene in which a parish church full of colonists is locked and burned. Reviewer Roger Ebert stated in his assessment of the movie that “none of it has much to do with the historical reality of the Revolutionary War.”