Revolution is a 1985 British historical drama film directed by Hugh Hudson, written by Robert Dillon, and starring Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland and Nastassja Kinski.
On 4 July 1776, fur trapper Tom Dobb and his young son Ned sail to New York City.
Dobb is unable to get his wares returned, while Ned enlists to the Continental Army as a drummer boy against his father's wishes.
While looking for soldiers to feed, she discovers Dobb and Ned lying in a field, who describe to her the chaos of fighting the British at Brooklyn Heights.
Daisy pleads with her merchant father back home in New York to support the patriots but is largely ignored and admonished for her views.
Dobb and a fellow prisoner are forced to participate in a "fox hunt" by sadistic British soldiers, dragging an effigy of George Washington through the wilderness.
Ned, now running with a gang of homeless young men, is impressed into British service by Peasy, along with his friend Merle.
Daisy joins a wagon train that is leaving with wounded volunteers; to Dodd's horror, the convoy is attacked and torched by armed Loyalists.
After having recently made The Right Stuff, based on a true story, Winkler decided to focus on a fictional father and son.
Warners did not like the script and didn't agree to finance it, so Winkler bought it back, attached Hugh Hudson as director, and took the project to other studios to see if they were interested.
The site's critics consensus states: "Unlikely to inspire any fervor with its miscast ensemble and ponderous script, Revolution is a star-spangled bummer.
"[8] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 22 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews"[9] Variety's staff commented, "Watching Revolution is a little like visiting a museum – it looks good without really being alive.
"[10] A reviewer for the UK-based Time Out called it "an almost inconceivable disaster which tries for a worm's eye view of the American Revolution...maybe the original script had a shape and a grasp of events.
"[11] Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a mess, but one that's so giddily misguided that it's sometimes a good deal of fun for all of the wrong reasons.
"[12] Pauline Kael commented in The New Yorker that "everything in this picture, which goes from the beginning of the American War of Independence in 1776 to the end of combat in 1783, seems dissociated.
The director, Hugh Hudson, plunges us into gritty, muddy re-stagings of famous campaigns, but we don't find out what's going on in these campaigns, or what their importance is in the course of the war...Hudson and the scriptwriter, Robert Dillon, present the war as a primal Oedipal revolt of the Colonies against the parent country, and the relationships of the characters are designed in Oedipal pairs; Hudson also stages torture orgies to indicate how sadistic the redcoats are, and scenes are devised to set up echoes of the Rocky series and Rambo.
[19][20] Reviewing the new version of the film for Variety, Jay Weissberg wrote, "The results generally improve the movie, now titled Revolution Revisited, but numerous problems are insurmountable.