Revolution: The Director's Cut (DVD & Blu-ray) [1985]

This is a review of the Director's Cut version of Revolution.

Having watched the original theatrical version of this film many years ago and being rather underwhelmed, out of curiosity I recently viewed the 2009 'revisited' version and I can honestly say that I was really impressed with how small but critical changes to a film can make such a vast improvement to a viewing experience.

There have been several minor edits thoughout this film to give it more pace and the Warner Bros-enforced tacked-on happy ending has been justly excised. However, the most beneficial change is the addition of a new narration by Pacino. This isn't your usual type of narration which explains absolutely everything, leaves nothing to the imagination and totally disengages the audience. Rather, Pacino's unique voiceover of his character's thoughts is both clever and subtle and provides a means of pointing the viewer in the right direction, leaving them to discover for themselves reasons and motivations, thus making the film much more absorbing and effectively revealing the story within for the first time.

Revolution has been unjustly maligned over the years for various reasons. Pacino's accent has been roundly castigated for being absurd but in actual fact was extremely well researched and language experts have confirmed it as being totally authentic for the time. A lot of criticism has come from American critics who must have objected to British filmmakers telling an 'American' history. As Hugh Hudson points out, however, this is a British story; America was a British colony at the time and this film was not meant to be a grand epic documenting the history of American independance but instead was meant to present the personal story of a father and son caught up in a war, a war of which they have no understanding.

My advice is to try and ignore everything that has been written about this film before and discover it for yourself for the first time. You may still thinks its flawed but at least you can make up your own mind and don't allow anyone to tell you what to think. You might be surprised.

**CONTAINS SPOLERS**

I don't quite understand these sniper reviews that say things like 'this film is the worse film i've ever see. So there'. Care to bother to write why?

Anyway, I didn't have the original to compare this 'Director's Cut' with but much like the notorious and often derided Heaven's Gate, this film actually has a bit to recommend it. It's essentially a British film (then, as now, with American finance behind it) about the American War of Independence, with impressive scale and period attention to detail, way before the days of now ubiquitous digital CGI. Visually, it lives up to Hugh Hudson's reputation (like Ridley Scott, Hudson was one of the top commercials directors in the world in the 70s & 80s, and not for nothing) with some impressive battlefield sequences as well as set & costume design. The handheld pseudo documentary camerawork, which doesn't entirely work for me, was still way ahead of the game for a feature film of that era.

The director's cut features a new voice over by Al Pacino which describes his character Tom Dobbs innermost thoughts about his experiences. Although i had difficulty hearing it at times, it probably does add something substantive to the film, reminiscent to the introspective style Terence Malick utilises voiceover in his films. Pacino by the way, as ever, is solid in this film, taking a real risk on it too. There's talk on the special features of how Richard Gere was originally considered and how even Sly Stallone voiced an interested. All I can say is that if a film starring Al Pacino can fail as badly as Revolution originally did, just think how much worse things really could have been with 'Rambo' Dobbs.

Where the film disappoints is in it's script. Surely it would have been better for Dobbs' son to get press-ganged into the British army earlier in the film and make more of their desperate journey to reunite, against the backdrop of the War? Instead we've got sidetracked scenes of Pacino being fox hunted by toffee nosed Brits and the guy from the Crystal Maze. Nastassja Kinski's character is also under developed...there's simply not enough presence to make the love interest thing work with Pacino, nor do we really get a feel for her and her motivations. Out of all the people she would have met throughout her war travails, why should she even remember them later on in the film? I also actually preferred the original ending (it's on the DVD special features) where we see that Kinski does in fact survive to the end of the war - instead it's never resolved in the new Directors Cut. Yes, it may be a more Hollywood ending, but it's also just better storytelling IMO. It's just the naff way that it was presented in the original cut that makes it feel tacked on. Donald Sutherland's character also feels terribly underwritten, making you wonder if an actor of his calibre had substantial scenes cut out. Such a waste of talent, and money. Sutherland's character is also supposed to sound like a Scotsman, but as a Scotsman myself I found him unintelligible most of the time. However one wants to promote the authenticity of the way people would have spoken in the 1770s, a film is in trouble if the audience can't understand what an actor is saying.

All in all it feels an untidy, uneven film, with Pacino doing his utmost best to make sense of it all. Definitely worth a watch but It's a frustrating film given that as i've said there is much to recommend it...epic, ambitious, daring, risky, visually stunning. However it could have been a much stronger film had more time and attention been paid to a stronger script. I don't think Hugh Hudson deserved to be de facto blacklisted from feature work as long as he did after this and it's sad that such a talent never seemed to quite recover or gain the heights of Parker/Scott et al. There's a saying...you can make a bad movie out of a good script, but you can't make a good movie out of a bad script. 'Revolution' falls into the latter category.

After seeing the director's cut over 20 years since the original, it is definitely worth it for those who are history buffs and love the 18th Century/American Revolution. True some of the parts are a bit hard to swallow (like the fox hunt) and big chunks of character development seem to be noticeably missing (like no action battle scenes really of Pacino's Anti-hero morphing into a loyal scout in action to redeem his running away from the first lost battles and deserting). However, like, Hugh Hudson, the director says it is not American history but British history and quite emphatically . . anti-war (probably a bit anti-American or at least ever so subtly anti-Founding Fathers).

That being said, in terms of recreating the chaos of a NY Street in 1776 or the arrogance of British aristocrat officers amongst the "colonialists" or recreating the chaos of a rag-tag rebel army at their first defeats in desperate retreat - the movie is ingenius and I would love anyone to come up with a better example of realism. Of course no one alive today was there back then, so we can only discern and inevitably speculate what it must have been like. Yes I have studied the American Revolution, read literature from the time and can consider myself an amateur historian - I think this film comes closer than any to getting the "smell" or in the streets and battle field for some of the experience the American Revolution must have been to the participants. The battles scenes in Barry Lyndon by Kubrik come to my mind. The alternatives are "The Patriot" or a sanitized made for TV movie, which as anyone interested in anything of artistic merit knows is made for the masses cheap entertainment.

This film is anything but cheap. Expensive to produce, the attention to historic details impressive, and the vision of Hudson as director and Robert Dillon's script of the man in the street was very expensive in terms of not just cash, but blood sweat and tears. Pacino's accent seemed perfect for the purpose and Kinski is a very believable and adorable revolutionary lady - Sutherland of course is par excellence too.

Not perfect, yes one can find things to criticize, but step into into it and let go. A film well worth the viewing for the devoted historian and lover of 18th century America!

One thing to do is both versions of the fim are on the DVD so you can watch both versions and compare, I like both.