First off, the history-minded moviegoer will already take issue with The Uprising having anything to do with the stories of Robin Hood. The film very specifically takes place during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, during the reign of King Richard II, while legends of Robin Hood started cropping up much earlier; even in his cartooniest iterations, Robin is consistently a pal of King Richard The Lionheart, who lived and died a few hundred years prior. Even if your semi-historical fiction condenses all that time into a vague, hand-waving “Middle Ages,” it’s still courting the ire of medieval scholars everywhere to meld together the literary characters of the Ploughman (played here by Andrew Garfield) and Robin Of Locksley.
Yet, after seeing The Uprising—including its final 10 or so minutes that pivot hard into a weird pseudo-Robin Hood origin story—you can see where they’re coming from, even if it elicits more resentment than excitement. In those final jarring minutes, coming after a post-Revolt time jump, a newly hooded Ploughman and his band of merry men (and one merry woman) stop the traitorous King Richard II (Woody Norman) and his weepy mother (Katherine Waterston) on the road through the forest. A flurry of perfectly placed arrows follows. Guards fall, justice is bloodily served, and an Arrow-like Ploughman confronts the liege who betrayed him and his movement.
It’s Halloween-costume (or Men In Tights) levels of iconography, trotted out as the natural end result of a medieval peasant’s political radicalization. There were so many serfs spilling blood in The Uprising, it’s surprising there aren’t dozens of competing hooded outlaws milling about in the woods. But when Garfield is in his superhero-lite take on the costume—his face obscured by a hood, a bandana, and a lot of grime—he extols the virtues of his new forest-dwelling community of bandits, who live outside the rule of the law. If The Death Of Robin Hood gave the figure a Logan-like funeral that overly demystified the thief, The Uprising gives one very much like him a similarly grim and grounded birth.
The only problem—well, one of many problems—is that audiences have already gotten tons of versions of this Robin-Hood-as-superhero that don’t shy away from actually calling the guy by his name, ranging from the airy and swashbuckling to the sweatily grim. The former, the Technicolor and Disney versions still sit comfortably atop the cultural imagination; the latter, ranging in seriousness across Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, and Taron Egerton’s depictions, still try to differentiate themselves as the “grown-up” versions of the story. There was at least some momentary satisfaction in The Death Of Robin Hood taking those to their grave, only for dark-and-gritty not-Robin’s hand to shoot up like a slasher at the misguided end of The Uprising.
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