Revolution (1985)

This is one of my favorites. You would probably have to be a history nut to agree with me. While the story sometimes lags and gets boring, this is a well made period piece. The locations, wardrobe, dialect add to a historically accurate drama. Unlike The Patriot, this movie looks and feels real. Al Pacino's character Tom Dobb Is an ordinary man in extraordinary times. He is unwilling to fight as he has lost his entire family except for one young son who is lured in to the romance of war. In order to protect his son Tom Dobb must fight for his country. This is the viewpoint of the Revolutionary War from a common man. No generals or grand battle plans, just a man trying to save his family who helps save a country. There are so few movies dedicated to the Revolutionary War, This one is the best of them all.

Fmovies: From its unintelligible accents to its wretched miscasting to its overblown plot about lovers being separated by the chaos of war and revolution to its ridiculous location shots to its absurd portrayal of the American Revolution as a combination of the French Revolution and the Vietnam War, Hugh Hudson's "Revolution" is an absolute mess.

It was also a critical and box-office bomb that hurt the careers of everyone involved in its making. Its director Hugh Hudson was briefly a hot commodity in the early 1980's thanks to his grossly over-rated "Chariots of Fire" somehow winning Best Picture in 1981. The disaster that was "Revolution" pretty much ended his career. It also put its writer Robert Dillon's career on hiatus. Its star, Al Pacino, was so embarrassed by it by that he stepped-away from film-acting for four years. It derailed the attempt to turn Nastassja Kinski into a bankable movie star. And even Donald Sutherland saw his career temporarily reduced to foreign and TV films in its aftermath. With the exceptions of 1956's "The Conqueror" and 1980's "Heaven's Gate," it's hard to name a movie that had a more catastrophic effect upon its cast and crew.

What went wrong? Let's start with casting Al Pacino with his "Nu Yawk" accent as an 18th century fur trapper. Not good. Nor was it helped by its overlong and convoluted story of a father (Pacino) and his son being dragooned into the Continental Army and then meeting the revolutionary daughter (Kinski) of a wealthy NY Tory family before being separated "Gone with the Wind"-like by various tribulations and tragedies. Its "American Revolutionary" extras (one of them British pop singer Annie Lennox) carry-on as if they walked off the set of an adaption of "A Tale of Two Cities." Its British characters are absurd caricatures: the unintelligible sergeant major (Sutherland) and officers who are either foppish homosexuals or sadistic pedophiles. Further, for some reason American Indians (one of them young Graham Greene) are portrayed as being present in both armies at Yorktown. And it was filmed on locations in England and Norway that look NOTHING like the mid-Atlantic states its supposed to be set in. The coast of peninsular Virginia does not feature rocky cliffs!

It's not only awful history, but just plain bad film-making with too many interminable scenes where characters are just mumbling into each other's ears.

In sum: a truly terrible movie. I rarely give single star ratings, but "Revolution" richly deserves one considering how it's virtually unwatchable. Its sheer awfulness ruined and damaged careers and reputations.

Brilliant actor as he is, Al Pacino completely derails Revolution – his Method acting approach is totally ill-suited to the role of an illiterate trapper caught up in the American War of Independence. Much of the blame should be attributed to director Hugh Hudson (yes, the man who made Chariots Of Fire just a couple of years earlier – talk about a come-down!!). One of the many jobs of a director is to marshal the actors, coaxing believable performances from them, but in this case Hudson has allowed Pacino to run amok without asking for restraint of any kind. It's not just Al's career-low performance that hinders the film though: there are numerous other flaws with Revolution, more of which will be said later.

Illiterate trapper Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) lives in the north-eastern region of America with his son Ned (Sid Owen/Dexter Fletcher). He leads a simple life – living off the land, raising his son, surviving against the elements. The country is lorded over by the English colonialists, but during an eight year period (1775-83) a revolution takes place which ends with the British being defeated and the independent American nation being born. Dobb gets caught up in the events when his boat and his son are conscripted by the Continental Army – swept away by events they can barely understand, the Dobbs finds themselves fighting for their lives and freedom in one bloody engagement after another. Tom also falls in love with Daisy McConnahay (Natassja Kinski), a beautiful and fiery woman of British aristocratic ancestry. Their forbidden love is played out against the larger historical context of the fighting.

Where to start with the film's flaws? Most key actors are miscast – Pacino has been criticised enough already, but Kinski fares little better as the renegade aristocrat while Donald Sutherland is hopelessly lost as a ruthless English soldier with a wobbly Yorkshire accent. Robert Dillon's script is muddled in its attempts to bring massive historical events down to a personal level. At no point does anyone seem to have decided whether this is meant to be an intimate character study with the American Revolution as a backdrop, or an epic war film with a handful of sharply drawn characters used to carry the story along. As a result, the narrative falls into no man's land, flitting from "grand spectacle" to "small story" indiscriminately and meaninglessly. John Corigliano's score is quite ghastly, and is poured over the proceedings with neither thought nor subtlety. Hugh Hudson's direction is clumsy throughout, both in his mismanagement of Pacino and the other key actors, and in the decision to use irritatingly shaky camera work during the action sequences. The idea of the hand-held camera is to create immediacy – that feeling of "being there" in the confusion of battle and musket fire. Like so many other things in the film, it doesn't work. The one department where the film regains a modicum of respectability is the period detail, with costumes, sets and weaponry that look consistently accurate. But if it's period detail you're interested in a trip to the museum would be a better way to spend your time, because as a rousing cinematic experience Revolution doesn't even begin to make the grade. Nothing more than a £18,000,000 mega-bomb that the ailing British film industry could ill afford in the mid-1980s.

Revolution fmovies. I can't figure Al Pacino out. I watch him in the Godfather, Scarface, Carlito's Way, and I think I am watching one of the greatest actors of the last thirty years. Then I see him in Two for the Money, Any Given Sunday and Revolution, and I wonder what the guy is thinking.

I stumbled on Revolution a few nights ago, and thought I would invest the next two hours on this. Here is a news flash: Want to get prisoners to talk? Force them to watch this over and over...they'll confess to anything.

I won't rehash the plot since there is no coherent plot, but it does take place during the American Revolution and Pacino plays an uneducated peasant who does not want to get involved, but ultimately does. While he has no money, no education and dresses like a caveman, a very hot Natasha Kinski falls in love with him for no apparent reason, since they have only two minutes of dialogue together.

Quite frankly, if "Al Smith" starred in this movie, instead of "Al Pacino", it would have ruined their career. The script was horrible, but Pacino's demotivated performance and obvious fake accent made it even worse. Donald Sutherland's role was laughable. I really can't describe it. Natasha Kinski is a main character, but has like 5 lines in the movie. In fact, nobody speaks much in this movie.

One of the most laughable premise in the movie is how Al Pacino and Kinski have this uncanny knack to continually run into each other on the battlefield. Its like the entire Northeast is a Starbucks. "Hey, funny to see you here again, on ANOTHER battlefield 100 miles away...see you in a few months".

I am required to give this one star by IMDb, since there is nothing here for a negative score.

Searching for some short-length used videotapes, I found the laserdisc version of "Revolution," which I'd never seen. This non-letterbox, TV format version had the usual "talking to air" problem with 2.35:1 movies. Although a scratch and miscellaneous dirt made the picture skip/repeat/wobble, it was an interesting foxhole-level look at the American Revolution. The scenery, set design, costumes, and varied kinds of people made me think that this was Sergio Leone's take on The War for Independence. Was Al Pacino believable as a backwoods English colonist? No, but like a scratch running through a film, the "speech impediment" is overlooked as the tale unfolds. This film, unlike "The Patriot," shows camp followers, Indians on both sides, fighting women, "Not Worth a Continental" issues, lots of dirt and the conventions and results of 18th century warfare. Valley Forge isn't as grim an encampment as paintings and written records reported, but it's a close miss for the English countryside location. Are the characters believable? Hard to tell, since their histories and motives aren't complete. (Having the action jump place to place with jumps in time make this a "fill-in-the-missing-backstory" exercise found in James Clavell's book "Nobel House" series.) Is it an interesting movie? Definitely, and has that 18th century "fleas, dirt, and grease" look that is missing from "The Patriot." 7/10, for presenting issues and motives that turned English colonists into Americans.

I'm all for the idea of a grand epic of the American Revolutionary War. This ain't it. (And for that matter, neither was the Emmerich/Devlin/Gibson THE PATRIOT. But I digress.)

I saw this film at a publicity screening at the old MGM Studios (now Sony) just before it came out. The audience had high expectations for this expensive period piece, written by veteran Robert Dillon, directed by the esteemed Hugh Hudson (of CHARIOTS OF FIRE fame), and starring Al Pacino.

But it didn't take long for people to start squirming in their seats, whispering derisive comments about Pacino's horribly misconceived accent -- he was supposed to be an American frontiersman of Scottish ancestry(!) -- and that of Nastassja Kinski, who was supposed to be recently emigrated from England(!!). Then the story started and it all went downhill fast.

Motivations were muddled, dialogue was atrocious, events had no historical or political context. What there was of a plot lurched forward on absurd coincidence; by the second or third time that alleged lovers Pacino and Kinski stumbled into each other it had become a bad joke. Donald Sutherland gave an unhinged performance as a British officer/pederast. His accent was all over the map too. I guess there weren't any English actors available.

Lots of people left. Those who stayed tried to stifle giggles, then openly guffawed. I stuck it out -- I figured that at least the battle scenes might be good. I was wrong. Inexplicably, Hudson chose to film them with hand-held cameras, not even Steadicam, the jerkiness giving a misplaced newsreel 'authenticity' which ruined the sense of scale.

There was a semi-famous TV reviewer in the audience a few rows ahead of me: (the late) Gary Franklin of Channel 7 Eyewitness News. I could tell he was peeved by the behavior of the rest of us. And sure enough, on his TV segment the next day he gave the film a '10' on his notorious 'Franklin Scale of 1 to 10', while remarking churlishly about the louts who'd disrupted the screening the night before, who clearly didn't know art when they saw it. What a buffoon.

After this disaster, Pacino didn't star in another film for almost 4 years. Hugh Hudson's career never recovered. You can't say I didn't warn you.