From its unintelligible accents to its wretched miscasting to its overblown plot about lovers being separated by the chaos of war and revolution to its ridiculous location shots to its absurd portrayal of the American Revolution as a combination of the French Revolution and the Vietnam War, Hugh Hudson's "Revolution" is an absolute mess.
It was also a critical and box-office bomb that hurt the careers of everyone involved in its making. Its director Hugh Hudson was briefly a hot commodity in the early 1980's thanks to his grossly over-rated "Chariots of Fire" somehow winning Best Picture in 1981. The disaster that was "Revolution" pretty much ended his career. It also put its writer Robert Dillon's career on hiatus. Its star, Al Pacino, was so embarrassed by it by that he stepped-away from film-acting for four years. It derailed the attempt to turn Nastassja Kinski into a bankable movie star. And even Donald Sutherland saw his career temporarily reduced to foreign and TV films in its aftermath. With the exceptions of 1956's "The Conqueror" and 1980's "Heaven's Gate," it's hard to name a movie that had a more catastrophic effect upon its cast and crew.
What went wrong? Let's start with casting Al Pacino with his "Nu Yawk" accent as an 18th century fur trapper. Not good. Nor was it helped by its overlong and convoluted story of a father (Pacino) and his son being dragooned into the Continental Army and then meeting the revolutionary daughter (Kinski) of a wealthy NY Tory family before being separated "Gone with the Wind"-like by various tribulations and tragedies. Its "American Revolutionary" extras (one of them British pop singer Annie Lennox) carry-on as if they walked off the set of an adaption of "A Tale of Two Cities." Its British characters are absurd caricatures: the unintelligible sergeant major (Sutherland) and officers who are either foppish homosexuals or sadistic pedophiles. Further, for some reason American Indians (one of them young Graham Greene) are portrayed as being present in both armies at Yorktown. And it was filmed on locations in England and Norway that look NOTHING like the mid-Atlantic states its supposed to be set in. The coast of peninsular Virginia does not feature rocky cliffs!
It's not only awful history, but just plain bad film-making with too many interminable scenes where characters are just mumbling into each other's ears.
In sum: a truly terrible movie. I rarely give single star ratings, but "Revolution" richly deserves one considering how it's virtually unwatchable. Its sheer awfulness ruined and damaged careers and reputations.
It was also a critical and box-office bomb that hurt the careers of everyone involved in its making. Its director Hugh Hudson was briefly a hot commodity in the early 1980's thanks to his grossly over-rated "Chariots of Fire" somehow winning Best Picture in 1981. The disaster that was "Revolution" pretty much ended his career. It also put its writer Robert Dillon's career on hiatus. Its star, Al Pacino, was so embarrassed by it by that he stepped-away from film-acting for four years. It derailed the attempt to turn Nastassja Kinski into a bankable movie star. And even Donald Sutherland saw his career temporarily reduced to foreign and TV films in its aftermath. With the exceptions of 1956's "The Conqueror" and 1980's "Heaven's Gate," it's hard to name a movie that had a more catastrophic effect upon its cast and crew.
What went wrong? Let's start with casting Al Pacino with his "Nu Yawk" accent as an 18th century fur trapper. Not good. Nor was it helped by its overlong and convoluted story of a father (Pacino) and his son being dragooned into the Continental Army and then meeting the revolutionary daughter (Kinski) of a wealthy NY Tory family before being separated "Gone with the Wind"-like by various tribulations and tragedies. Its "American Revolutionary" extras (one of them British pop singer Annie Lennox) carry-on as if they walked off the set of an adaption of "A Tale of Two Cities." Its British characters are absurd caricatures: the unintelligible sergeant major (Sutherland) and officers who are either foppish homosexuals or sadistic pedophiles. Further, for some reason American Indians (one of them young Graham Greene) are portrayed as being present in both armies at Yorktown. And it was filmed on locations in England and Norway that look NOTHING like the mid-Atlantic states its supposed to be set in. The coast of peninsular Virginia does not feature rocky cliffs!
It's not only awful history, but just plain bad film-making with too many interminable scenes where characters are just mumbling into each other's ears.
In sum: a truly terrible movie. I rarely give single star ratings, but "Revolution" richly deserves one considering how it's virtually unwatchable. Its sheer awfulness ruined and damaged careers and reputations.