In 1381, English peasants rebelled against their feudal lords. It wasn’t the first rebellion of its kind, but it was an indication of the growing popularity of ideas about personal and economic liberty that would shape the coming centuries. It was also, as all revolutions are, a response to the gross injustices of the time. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman writes: “What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible.” 

You can imagine why that story might be relevant in 2026.

“The Uprising,” written and directed by Paul Greengrass (“Captain Phillips”), is certainly interested in drawing a line between 1381 and today. There’s plenty of material: the desire for freedom and justice, the ethics of armed resistance, and the ways that both governments and revolutionary movements use religion to achieve their aims. The film’s engagement with those themes is alternately thrilling and, unfortunately, a little shallow. 

Our focal point is Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), an ordinary laborer in the English countryside. His life is drudgery, working his lord’s field to fill his lord’s table while his own remains largely empty. He has no given name, or none that he’s willing to share: “I am what I do,” he explains. Like many in Europe at the time, he has lost loved ones—in his case, a wife and two children—to the Black Plague. We meet him caked in mud and burdened by grief, but beneath all of that burns a fierce rage. It erupts after witnessing the gross injustices of the lord’s tax collectors; a burst of outraged violence leaves a soldier dead and his village in open revolt. Other villages rise up as well, and this single act of rebellion becomes a movement. 

Leaders emerge, some of them to become historical figures. For strategy, they have Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a former soldier: competent, levelheaded. For fervor, they have John Ball (Jamie Bell), a firebrand priest condemned for his “heretical” doctrines of social equality. Ploughman also forges a bond with Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), a former nun whose revolutionary zeal is driven by a more personal fury.

They march on London with several thousand peasants, sacking courthouses and opulent cathedrals on the way. Their destination is the palace of King Richard II (Woody Norman): not to overthrow him but to seek his help. Richard is a boy king, controlled by a conniving council of advisors, whom the rebels blame for all injustices. As good medieval Englishmen, they believe that the king’s authority comes from God, that he embodies God’s justice and mercy on earth. Once he hears their pleas from their own mouths, he will certainly make things right. Not to spoil the film, but you can probably guess that this does not have a happy ending.

The film’s perspective on revolution is muddled, exemplified by its contradictory portrayal of the rebels. The four main revolutionaries are portrayed as heroic and noble, if sometimes fanatical, and the violence they commit is presented as cathartic. At other times, revolutionary violence is depicted as frightening and ugly. You could charitably interpret this as an attempt to engage with the messiness of revolution, but to me it too often felt as if it was the film trying to have it both ways: glorifying violence when it made for a good action scene but growing more cautious when it comes time to make a statement about that violence. 

It doesn’t help that the rebels are so often presented as a faceless, thoughtless mob, driven more by id than ideology. Some scenes resemble a zombie movie: grasping hands, bared teeth, inhuman growls, all captured by the shaky handheld camerawork that became Greengrass’s trademark in the Jason Bourne movies. This portrayal plays into old tropes about the common people as subhuman rabble. More troubling, it echoes the scare tactics used to discredit modern resistance movements.

Even the rebels we get to know remain too thinly drawn as characters. Garfield is a magnetic leading man and powerfully conveys the stormy emotions of his taciturn protagonist. But because Ploughman is a fictional character, and therefore has a limited ability to influence historical events, he spends much of the film’s first half on the sidelines, reduced to shaking his head in disapproval when he feels the revolution has gone too far. He gains more agency as the film goes on, but we never learn much more about him than we do in the film’s opening minutes. (And even that growth is in service of a “twist” late in the film that further muddies the waters by abandoning historical realism for folklore.)

The same criticism applies to Tyler, Ball and Alyce, although the talented actors in those roles add a lot of shading and nuance that is not present in the writing (see also Katherine Waterston as the queen mother and Jonny Lee Miller as the brutal mayor of London). In all respects, I wish “The Uprising” was a little deeper: in its themes, its characters and its portrait of the medieval world.

However, “The Uprising” is compelling as a meditation on the role of religion in politics. The 14th century was a time when God’s presence—and influence on events—was simply taken as given. The king derived his right to rule directly from God. As the archbishop (Stephen Dillane) tells him: “God chose you alone to do his will.” Divine right excuses all manner of corruption and brutality. 

But for the rebels, God is also the source of their right to liberty. John Ball teaches that God created all people to be equal. On the feast of Corpus Christi, he prophesies, God—through the king—will deliver a great miracle: equal rights for all. Until then, however, they must fight. The plague, he says, was God’s punishment for the sins of the rich. When Ploughman questions why the poor suffer as well, Ball responds: “To show us the truth and fill us with rage.”

It could all become very cynical—political forces hijacking religion to pacify or inflame the people—but Greengrass is careful to show us that all of the characters are sincere in their religious beliefs. Still, even sincerely held faith can lead you astray when it’s not based in truth. Aside from the obvious, blasphemous abuses of those in power, we see a crowd, inflamed by Ball’s preaching, turn to indiscriminate violence. Disgusted, Ploughman demands: “Where is God in any of this?”

“The Uprising” is most effective as a tragedy about putting your faith in the wrong things. Miracles don’t come from earthly kings (no matter how willing they are to promise them) and while armed resistance may sometimes be necessary, you can’t kill your way to a better world. In the film, miracles and change come the same way they do in life: when people stand together in the face of injustice and violence, and help each other rise. 

John Dougherty is the director of mission ministry at St. Joseph's Preparatory School in Philadelphia, Pa., moderator of America's Catholic Movie Club, and author of Finding God in All Films: A Contemplative Approach to Watching Movies. You can find more of his work on his Substack, Roll Credits.