The Patriot (2000) on Netflix
Benjamin Martin wants only to farm in peace in South Carolina, but his eldest son Gabriel enlists to fight the British. Gabriel comes home wounded with rebel dispatches.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.2/10316,615 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes62%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1776, Benjamin Martin is a widower with seven children and a veteran of the French and Indian War, living on a plantation in South Carolina. The colony's assembly votes on a levy for the Continental Army, and Benjamin abstains, unwilling to send other men into a war he will not join himself. His eldest son, Gabriel, enlists anyway, without his permission. Four years later Gabriel returns to the plantation wounded, carrying dispatches for the rebels, and the family is nursing soldiers of both armies when British dragoons arrive under Colonel William Tavington. Tavington presses the Martins' African American workers into the army and has Gabriel arrested as a spy. When Gabriel's brother Thomas tries to free him, Tavington kills Thomas and orders the house burned.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Patriot (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mel Gibson's character Benjamin Martin is not one real person but a composite stitched together from Revolutionary War militia leaders Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens, and Francis Marion, plus bits of other historical figures.
- The film's sadistic villain, Colonel Tavington, was loosely modeled on real British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton, who screenwriter Robert Rodat said was known in his own time for brutal conduct.
- Harrison Ford turned down the lead role of Benjamin Martin, calling the film too violent and saying it reduced the American Revolution to one man's revenge; Jude Law also passed on playing villain William Tavington, and the part instead went to Jason Isaacs after he sent in an audition tape.
SPOILER
Screenwriter Robert Rodat wrote seventeen drafts before settling on a final script; an early version had Anne pregnant with Gabriel's child when she is killed in the burning church, and Martin was originally written with six children, changed to seven only after Gibson's real seventh child was born.- Positive review quotes credited to a critic named David Manning of The Ridgefield Press were fabricated; Newsweek reporter John Horn investigated and found the small Connecticut paper had never heard of the man, exposing a fake-critic promotional scandal around the film.
- Composer David Arnold, who had scored Roland Emmerich's Stargate, Independence Day and Godzilla, wrote a demo score for The Patriot that was rejected; he never worked with Emmerich again, and Harald Kloser and Thomas Wander took over scoring the director's later films.
- Banastre Tarleton, the real officer who partly inspired Tavington, was remembered as a hero in Liverpool; the city's council, led by Mayor Edwin Clein, publicly demanded an apology over what it called the film's character assassination of him.
