The Patriot

Name Lecturer Course Date The Patriot The film The Patriot is shrouded by many historical inaccuracies, however its producer Mark Gordon was quoted as having said thus: While the film tells a fictional story, the backdrop was serious history." The movie attracted two divergent views, on one hand there were those who described it as just another entertainment movie; the other school of those is made up of those who termed The Patriot as an attempt to "rape our history which would reverse the hard work that history teachers had done". As a matter of fact The Patriot is one movie that extensively polarizes our history, which has not gone down well with the defenders of historical integrity. For starters, the exploding projectiles portrayed in the film had not been invented then- at the time of the war. Another glaring historical bluff is the fact that the standard-issue flag was not taken into the battle, but the movie attempts to teach us otherwise. There was no order extended by the congress in real life to the slaves that provided that they were to serve for 12 months in the Colonial Army, that is centrally to the movie. These are among the various inaccuracies that have been documented, but besides that the movie had one significant deficiency, the film almost completely left out the loyalists. One notable segment of Georgia and the Carolinas population remained quite loyal. Though the loyalist provincial and militia units were made up of one half of the British troops in the South, the film only portrays just one loyalist soldier who was Captain Wilkins in the Captain Tavington`s dragoons. Another principle inaccuracy id The Patriot is the deliberate attempt by the film to portray the British soldiers as evil and bloodthirsty sadists. One compelling scene in the film is where we see the redcoats rounding up a village of terrified and screaming women, children and old men, then locking them up in a church building and setting it ablaze. There was really no such a thing that ever happened during that Revolutionary War. That scene depicted a similar one that happened in real life this time in the second world war and orchestrated by the Nazi soldiers in France, so in actual sense, the film was trying to paint the British soldiers as being extremely cruel by comparing them to the Nazis. The film is driven by the alliances, interactions and even conflicts of four major characters; Benjamin Martin, Gabriel Martin, British Colonel William Tavington and General Cornwallis. Benjamin Martin was the protagonist and is portrayed as a hero. He was a devoted family man who is driven by the need to secure his family`s future. In the battlefront he was portrayed as shrewd and thorough and his tactics made him be recognized as a hero able to evade the enemy in by employing some guerilla tactics taking the nickname "The Ghost" for that. Gabriel Martin was portrayed as the catalyst and patriotic. His conviction, idealism and sacrifice were...