The Uprising: What the Critics Actually Got Right, and What They Missed

Paul Greengrass's The Uprising arrived in American cinemas on 10 September 2026, a fictionalised account of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt built around Andrew Garfield's invented protagonist, "the Ploughman." British audiences will have to wait until October to judge for themselves. In the meantime, the critical response from the United States offers something worth examining on its own terms: not just whether the film is good, but what the reviews reveal about how modern critics engage with medieval history when it is dressed up as prestige cinema.

The aggregate numbers tell a story of hesitation rather than rejection. Rotten Tomatoes has the film sitting somewhere in the low fifties from a pool of roughly thirty critics, an average score near 5.8 out of 10. Metacritic places it at 45, the flat, institutional language of "mixed or average" doing a lot of work to paper over what are, in places, sharply divided opinions. This is not a consensus. It is a stalemate between critics who admire the film's ambition and those who found its execution wanting.

Where the praise lands

The performances draw the most consistent approval. Garfield's grieving farmer, a man history never named, is widely credited with grounding the film emotionally, and the supporting cast, Jamie Bell as John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis as Wat Tyler, Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie, and Woody Norman as the boy king Richard II, are singled out for doing serious work in service of a script that does not always meet them halfway.

The action sequences, too, get their due. Greengrass's handheld, documentary-adjacent style, the same approach that served him well in United 93 and the Bourne films, produces moments critics describe as visceral and immersive when the camera is following chaos rather than character. The production design, shot in Germany for its preserved medieval settings, aims for a grimy and deliberately unromantic look at fourteenth-century England, and several reviewers took this as a genuine corrective to the sanitised version of the period that period dramas usually offer. It is worth noting that Germany was not the only option on the table for a production chasing convincing medieval texture: Wales has become a working backdrop for exactly this kind of filmmaking, with the Elden Ring adaptation shooting at Conwy and Dolbadarn castles earlier this year, proof that the country's surviving fortifications do not need much dressing to read as medieval on screen.

Where the film loses critics

The same handheld style that energises the battle sequences is repeatedly blamed for undermining everything around them. Reviewers describe the shaky-cam approach as exhausting, monotonous, and simply the wrong tool for a story that needs room to breathe between its outbreaks of violence. What works as visceral immediacy in an action set piece becomes, in a courtroom or a negotiation, closer to nausea.

The more serious complaint concerns structure. Several critics describe the film as muddled, generic, or reminiscent of a History Channel dramatisation rather than a fully realised historical epic, and the blending of real historical figures with an invented central hero is cited as a source of diluted characterisation rather than added resonance. The third act draws the sharpest criticism of all. Reviewers note that the film takes considerable liberties with the actual events at Smithfield on 15 June 1381, softening a historical defeat, Tyler killed, Ball executed, the revolt's demands revoked, into something closer to a triumphant ending. One reviewer's phrase for this was a "bizarre, anachronistic path" that breaks with the comparative accuracy of the film's earlier scenes. Set against our own week-by-week timeline of the revolt, the gap between what actually happened at Smithfield and what the film shows is not a matter of compression or simplification. It is a rewritten outcome.

The marketing did the film no favours either. A subtitle, "The Rise of Robin Hood," was floated and then quietly dropped, but not before critics and commentators pointed out the awkward chronology involved: the Robin Hood legends are traditionally set roughly two hundred years earlier, in the reign of Richard the Lionheart. The film itself never names Robin Hood outright, though a green hooded figure and a folkloric epilogue gesture in that direction. Historical consultant Dan Jones has argued that Robin Hood ballads were already circulating by the 1380s and that the figure "would not have been out of place" in this context, which is a defensible point of literary history, but it did little to stop the marketing confusion from becoming a talking point in its own right.

This is, in miniature, the problem we have written about before when it comes to how mass media shapes public understanding of history, whether that medium is a social feed or a 130 million dollar historical epic. A dropped subtitle does not undo the association it created for the weeks it was live, and a great many cinemagoers will walk into The Uprising already primed to expect Robin Hood, regardless of what the finished film actually delivers.

The accuracy question, properly framed

It is worth being precise about what kind of history The Uprising is claiming to tell, because the reviews themselves are not always precise on this point. Greengrass has said plainly that he did not set out to make "a documentary about the Peasants' Revolt or a history lesson." The Ploughman is invented by design, a stand-in for the thousands of unnamed men who actually did the rebelling while history remembered only Tyler and Ball. That is a legitimate choice, and arguably a more honest one than pretending a single named hero drove events that were, in reality, a mass uprising with diffuse leadership.

Where the film's relationship with history becomes harder to defend is the ending. Inventing a composite everyman is a standard device of historical fiction. Rewriting the outcome of Smithfield into something closer to victory is a different kind of liberty, one that trades the genuinely bleak, complicated aftermath of the revolt (the crown's promises revoked within weeks, the executions that followed, serfdom persisting for generations) for the shape of a Hollywood ending. Several critics noticed this, and rightly treated it as a structural problem rather than a minor quibble. A revolt whose brutal suppression is precisely what makes it historically significant loses something essential when the film flinches from that suppression in its final act.

There is also a smaller point worth flagging for anyone who has followed pre-release commentary: concern that the rebels would be shown fighting primarily with sickles and farm tools, reinforcing a stereotype of the peasantry as poorly armed. The historical record complicates this. Rebels in 1381 acquired proper weapons, including longbows, where they could get them. Whether the finished film leans into the farm-tool cliché or avoids it is something UK audiences will be able to judge for themselves come October.

What this means for a UK release still weeks away

For British viewers, the useful takeaway is not "should I see this" so much as "what should I expect." This is not a film aiming for documentary fidelity, and reviewing it, or watching it, as though it were will produce disappointment regardless of the marketing's brief flirtation with Robin Hood branding. It is historical fiction in the fullest sense: real causes, a real revolt, real named figures moving through a story built around a fictional centre, with a climax that has been reshaped for dramatic satisfaction rather than historical accuracy.

Whether that trade is worth making is, ultimately, the question the American reviews have not resolved between themselves. The revolt itself, its causes in plague, taxation, and the grinding persistence of serfdom, deserves an audience willing to sit with its actual, unhappy ending. Whether The Uprising gives them the chance to do that, or steers them away from it in its closing act, is exactly the argument UK critics will be having in October.

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