The Uprising (2026) Review: A Missed Opportunity to Bring the Peasants’ Revolt to Life

Paul Greengrass’s historical drama has the setting, the subject and the potential for a compelling story. But for me, it never quite brings the people or the rebellion of 1381 to life.

Rating: 2/5

There are few episodes in medieval English history better suited to the big screen than the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. A kingdom still living with the consequences of the Black Death, ordinary people pushed to breaking point by taxation and government policy, and a mass rebellion that brought thousands to London to confront the Crown. Add a teenage king, radical preaching and the violent collapse of the established order, and the ingredients for a gripping historical drama are all there.

Unfortunately, having watched The Uprising, I came away disappointed.

Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Andrew Garfield, the film tackles one of the most significant popular rebellions in English history. There are things to appreciate, particularly the scenery and the portrayal of the young King Richard II. But too often, I found myself frustrated by what the film left unexplained, the characters it failed to develop and its approach to some of the most important figures in the revolt.

For a film dealing with an uprising driven by genuine grievances, I wanted to understand more clearly why people were prepared to risk their lives in open rebellion. Instead, I was left feeling that a fascinating historical event had been reduced to a series of draymatic scenes without enough explanation or emotional substance to connect them.

A convincing medieval landscape

One of the film’s strengths is its scenery. The landscape helps establish the harshness of medieval life, and there are moments when the visual setting provides a convincing backdrop for the unrest. The world feels suitably bleak, and the production has clearly made an effort to create an environment in which the story can unfold.

The portrayal of King Richard II was another positive. The young king is an important figure in any account of the revolt, not least because the rebels initially believed that their grievances could be addressed by the monarch if only they could get past the advisers surrounding him. I thought Richard was played well, and his presence offered some of the more interesting moments in the film.

Unfortunately, good scenery and a convincing central royal figure cannot compensate for weaknesses in the storytelling. I wanted the film to make me feel that I was witnessing a society under immense pressure, with people making difficult decisions in circumstances they could barely control. Too often, the characters and their motivations felt underdeveloped.

The poll tax: the cause of a rebellion, barely explained

My biggest frustration was the film’s treatment of the taxation that helped trigger the revolt.

The poll tax was not simply another unpopular charge. England had levied successive poll taxes in 1377, 1379 and 1380 to help fund the Crown’s military expenditure. The tax introduced in 1380, collected in the following period, was particularly controversial. It imposed a heavy burden on ordinary people, while the demands of tax collection exposed the government to growing resentment and resistance. These pressures formed part of a wider crisis shaped by the aftermath of the Black Death and attempts by landowners and the state to restrict the economic opportunities of workers.

The problem is that the film does not explain this background clearly enough. I found its treatment of the tax increases and poll tax particularly weak. The audience needs to understand not merely that people are angry, but why the burden has become intolerable, how the government expects to collect the money and why resistance spreads beyond individual communities.

The Peasants’ Revolt did not emerge from nowhere. The Black Death had transformed the relationship between labour and land, while the authorities attempted to preserve existing structures of power. The poll tax became a flashpoint in a society already carrying years of accumulated grievance.

That context matters because it gives the rebellion its historical significance. Without it, the revolt risks looking like a sudden explosion of violence rather than a mass movement rooted in economic hardship, political resentment and demands for change.

For a film called The Uprising, that is a substantial missed opportunity.

Wat Tyler and John Ball: the missing force of the revolt

The film also struggled to convince me of the importance of its two most recognisable historical rebel leaders.

Wat Tyler was not simply another angry man in a crowd. He emerged as a leader of the Kentish rebels and became one of the central figures in the march on London. His negotiations with Richard II at Smithfield on 15 June 1381 ended in violence, and his death helped bring the rebellion in the capital towards its conclusion.

Yet I never felt that the film gave Tyler sufficient presence as a leader. I wanted to understand why people followed him, what made him effective and how he helped turn widespread anger into an organised challenge to royal authority. Instead, he failed to command the sense of authority that the historical importance of his role demands.

John Ball was equally disappointing for me. A radical preacher whose ideas challenged the established social hierarchy, Ball is associated with the famous question of why some people should live in privilege while others labour to sustain them. His preaching helped give the revolt an ideological dimension that went beyond resistance to taxation.

Ball should have been one of the film’s most compelling characters: a man whose religious convictions led him to challenge the assumptions on which medieval society rested. I did not find him particularly inspiring, and the film failed to give his ideas the weight they deserved.

There is also a significant historical distinction in how the film handles his fate. Ball was captured after the revolt and executed at St Albans on 15 July 1381, being hanged, drawn and quartered. The film instead depicts his death in a battle scene. That is a considerable departure from the historical record, and one that left me questioning why the filmmakers chose to change the circumstances of his death.

Historical dramas inevitably take liberties, but I would argue that changing the fate of a major historical figure needs to serve a clear dramatic purpose. Here, I was not convinced that it did.

Andrew Garfield and the problem of characterisation

Andrew Garfield plays the fictional central character known as the Ploughman, through whose experiences the audience is invited to view the revolt. I understand the appeal of using an invented character to represent ordinary people whose names and individual stories rarely survive in the historical record.

The difficulty is that I never found this character particularly engaging.

Garfield spends much of the film looking as though he is about to cry, with the remainder devoted to actually crying. The repeated close-up shots of his face, apparently intended to communicate grief, anger or brooding determination, became increasingly irritating. Rather than drawing me into his character’s emotional world, they began to feel repetitive.

The problem is not that a character should avoid showing grief. The events surrounding the revolt were brutal, and suffering is entirely appropriate to the subject. But emotional intensity needs to be supported by character development. I wanted to see the Ploughman evolve through his experiences, to understand his choices and to believe in the transformation that takes him from an individual struggling under oppression to a figure involved in a wider rebellion.

I did not feel that the film gave this transformation enough room to develop.

More generally, the characters were not given sufficient time to become fully realised people. Their motivations too often seemed to be assumed rather than explored. The result was a drama in which the audience was repeatedly shown intense emotion without necessarily being given enough reason to invest in the people experiencing it.

The acting overall felt mediocre to me, despite the occasional stronger performance. The scenery and the historical setting suggested a much better film than the characterisation ultimately delivered.

The problem with Alyce

Alyce, played by Thomasin McKenzie, was another character whose purpose I struggled to understand. I found her contribution to the story largely pointless.

This is not an objection to fictional characters in historical dramas. An invented character can offer an audience a way into a complicated period, particularly when the surviving evidence tells us relatively little about the lives of ordinary people. Such characters can provide a human perspective that the historical record cannot always supply.

But they need to contribute something meaningful to the narrative. They should illuminate the central themes, deepen our understanding of the protagonist or reveal something about the society in which the story takes place.

I never felt that Alyce was developed sufficiently to fulfil that role. Like several other characters, she seemed to occupy space in the story without adding enough depth to justify it.

This reinforces my wider criticism: the film has too many characters whose potential is never properly realised.

When the rebels start singing

One of the stranger features of the film is the rebels' frequent singing. I found it distracting, and the repetition became rather odd.

Music and collective singing can be effective in a historical drama. They can communicate solidarity, shared identity and the sense that individuals have become part of something larger than themselves. Used carefully, such moments might have helped convey how disparate groups of people came together in 1381.

Here, however, the effect did not work for me. The constant singing began to feel peculiar rather than powerful, drawing attention away from the unfolding drama instead of strengthening it.

It is a relatively small criticism compared with the weaknesses in the writing and characterisation, but it contributed to my overall sense that the film's dramatic choices did not always work as intended.

Does The Uprising do justice to the Peasants’ Revolt?

The historical liberties in The Uprising are not, in themselves, enough to make it a poor historical film. Cinema is not a documentary, and a filmmaker must make choices about which events to include, which characters to emphasise and how to build a coherent narrative from complicated historical evidence.

The question is whether those choices help the audience understand the past.

The Peasants’ Revolt was a major challenge to the established order. Rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, attacked symbols of royal and ecclesiastical authority, and demanded changes that included the abolition of serfdom. Their grievances extended well beyond the poll tax, and the revolt exposed deep tensions over labour, social status and the distribution of power.

The rising was ultimately suppressed. Richard II's promises to the rebels were withdrawn, and the Crown pursued those involved. The immediate political objectives of the revolt were not achieved, although the longer-term transformation of the English economy and the decline of serfdom cannot be reduced to a single event.

This is precisely the sort of history that deserves careful, intelligent treatment on screen. It is dramatic enough without needing to obscure the underlying causes or simplify its central figures.

I would have liked The Uprising to spend more time explaining the grievances that brought people together and less time relying on repeated displays of anguish and scenes of collective action whose wider significance is not always clear. The film could have made its audience care more deeply about the rebellion by helping us understand what the rebels wanted, why they believed change was possible and what they stood to lose.

Instead, I came away with the impression that the film had reached for the scale and intensity of a major historical epic without providing enough substance beneath the surface.

Final verdict: an opportunity missed

I wanted to like The Uprising more than I did. The Peasants’ Revolt is a fascinating and important episode in English history, and the film benefits from an appealing historical setting and a good portrayal of Richard II. There are ingredients here for a genuinely compelling drama.

But the characters lack depth, the explanation of the poll tax and the causes of the revolt is inadequate, and the treatment of Wat Tyler and John Ball fails to convey the importance of their historical roles. Andrew Garfield's repetitive expressions of anguish became tiresome, while the frequent singing of the rebels was an odd distraction. Too many of the dramatic choices left me unconvinced.

Most frustratingly, the film never made me feel that it had fully grasped the significance of the historical events it was portraying. The rebellion of 1381 was not simply a story of angry people taking up arms. It was a confrontation over how society should be organised, who should bear its burdens and whether ordinary people had any meaningful power to challenge those who governed them.

That story deserved better.

The Uprising is not without merit, but for me it falls well short of what it could have been. I would recommend looking into the history of the Peasants’ Revolt itself, which is considerably more interesting than this adaptation led me to hope.

My verdict: 2/5.

Read the thruth behind the film

• King Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt: He rode out to Mile End and Smithfield, granted charters of freedom to defuse the crisis, then broke every promise within weeks, telling the rebels villeins they were and villeins they would remain.
• The Poll Tax of 1381 Explained: The Poll Tax demanded a shilling a head, sparking evasion, an enquiry into fraud, and a violent revolt.
• Who Was John Ball?: A radical priest who preached social equality for decades before joining the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.
• Who Was Wat Tyler?: He led the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, rising from obscurity in Kent to command the rebel army that marched on London.
• Peasants' Revolt 1381: Full Timeline of Events: In seven weeks, rebel armies occupied London, executed the Archbishop of Canterbury, and forced a fourteen year old king to negotiate in person at Smithfield.
• Could Britain See a Modern Peasants' Revolt? highlights a recurring mechanism: economic pressure turns politically explosive when people believe the burdens placed on them are unjust and that those in authority no longer act in their interests.

Regular podcasts by Histories and Castles to help you get a deep dive understanding of histories events and figures.