The Uprising: Why British Cinema Keeps Failing Its Revolutions

By Daniel Okafor

Paul Greengrass's The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a revolting peasant, has finally given the 1381 Peasants' Revolt its first big-screen treatment — in 2026. That is 645 years after the event, which the Guardian calls a pivotal moment in British history. The film joins a very short club.

That club runs to three other titles: Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's 1975 Winstanley, Bill Douglas's 1986 Comrades, and Mike Leigh's 2018 Peterloo. Four films in fifty years. Hollywood manages that many failed rebellions in a bad weekend.

Why the delay?

The Guardian's argument is blunt. "The British are perverse," the piece opens. "We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners."

The evidence stacks up. Captain Scott died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to the south pole to Roald Amundsen — and Britain retells the story anyway. Christopher Nolan's 2017 Dunkirk "typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat." The Charge of the Light Brigade sent riders to "putatively glorious if stupid deaths" in the 1853-56 Crimean War.

So failure is fine. Pointless sacrifice is, in the Guardian's reading, what British heroism means. Cinema has colluded with the perversity.

What's the exception?

Revolutionary defeat. Britain avoids it. There is no film about the Chartist movement's 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage — a campaign for the vote, crushed and largely forgotten by the multiplex. The Peasants' Revolt (a 1381 uprising against serfdom and poll taxes) waited even longer.

The handful that exist share one theme: radical collective action crushed by a ruthless state. Winstanley covered the Diggers, a 17th-century communal land movement. Comrades dramatized the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farmworkers transported to Australia in 1834 for forming a union. Peterloo reconstructed the 1819 massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester.

Does The Uprising break the pattern?

One film does not reverse a centuries-old habit. But Greengrass has form with mass panic and institutional collapse — and Garfield's presence gives the project commercial weight the earlier trio never had. The test is whether The Uprising prompts more filmmakers to mine Britain's suppressed radical history, or remains the exception that proves a very British rule.