Braveheart (1995)

I thought Braveheart was stupid and bad, packed with so many things I hate about films.It’s overly violent and overly masculine in the worst possible ways. It uses rape as the inciting incident, which is lazy and exploitative. The British are comically evil - and look, the British actually are evil, but in this movie it’s just stupid and cartoonish rather than meaningfully critical.

The film is historically inaccurate to an almost offensive degree. It’s overly long, stretching nearly three hours for what amounts to a pretty thin story. The battle sequences are chaotic, but not in an interesting or compelling way - just messy and hard to follow without any real visual clarity or purpose. This movie embodies everything I don’t want from historical epics: bombastic masculinity, shallow characterization, exploitative violence against women to motivate the male hero, and a complete disregard for actual history in favor of mythmaking.

I get why this was a massive hit in 1995, but it has not aged well for me. At all.

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