The Best Revolutionary War Movies Ever Made

It's kind of crazy that America is about to turn 250, and we really don't have a ton of movies about the Revolutionary War. You'd think there would be tons, but the catalog of these titles is pretty scarce.

I'm from suburban Philadelphia and grew up across from the Brandywine Battlefield, so a lot of that war feels entrenched in every field trip and excursion.

But in media, you really have to search for these titles. I guess that might be because the war is brutal and linear. It can be hard to make that cinematic, but there are a few directors who I think went above and beyond, and made things that were both fun to watch but celebrated the thematic elements of the war for freedom, too.

Today, I want to go over the best Revolutionary War movies ever made and talk about what filmmakers can learn from each of them.

Let's dive in.

1. The Patriot (2000)

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• Director: Roland Emmerich
• Writer: Robert Rodat
• Cast: Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs
• Cinematographer: Caleb Deschanel

Yeah, so this is definitely not one that's tied too much to historical accuracy, but it's a blast. The movie has the epicness and grandeur of Roland Emmerich at the top of his game. And Heath Ledger and Mel Gibson shine in a script from Robert Rodat (who also penned Saving Private Ryan), which frames a massive continental conflict through the hyper-focused lens of a single family’s survival and revenge.

There's some insane camera movement where we go from dollies to handheld tracking shots during chaotic ambushes and wide, smoky compositions during formal line battles, all of which allows the audience to feel like a spectator to the war.

2. John Adams (2008)

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• Director: Tom Hooper
• Writers: Kirk Ellis (Screenplay), David McCullough (Book)
• Cast: Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, John Dossett, Stephen Dillane
• Cinematographer: Tak Fujimoto, Danny Cohen

There are so few good movies about the Revolutionary War that I am immediately cheating and putting this on the list, even though it's an HBO miniseries. The show shifts the focus away from the battlefields and into the claustrophobic rooms where we debated the intellectual framework of the America our heroes were fighting to found.

This is a great watch if you love dialogue, because it carries so much weight in these scenes. Hooper uses off-kilter framing, natural lighting, and a realistic production design to de-romanticize the Founding Fathers as real men with real problems.

3. 1776 (1972)

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• Director: Peter H. Hunt
• Writer: Peter Stone
• Cast: William Daniels, Howard Da Silva, Ken Howard, Blythe Danner
• Cinematographer: Harry Stradling Jr.

An American Revolutionary War musical shouldn't work, but 1776 handles its source material with surprising dramatic weight and kind of capitalizes the same way Hamilton did on Broadway

It is interesting to hear about the creation of America, and it is somehow funny to think of the Founding Fathers singing their concerns.

What I think we can take away as a lesson is that the pacing here is done with a ticking clock story. We see a countdown of when things have to happen by, and it adds some extra tension to the freewheeling musical that keeps it on track and keeps the story moving.

Other Revolutionary War Movies

I wasn't kidding when I said there weren't many. There are some other ones out there, so I just made a list below if you're dying to read more of these stories.

I had to include TV, too.

• Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–2017) – A cool AMC series focused entirely on the Culper Spy Ring. It shifts the focus to espionage rather than traditional battlefields. The series has a really neat production design and intrigue.
• Sons of Liberty (2015) – A highly stylized, action-forward History Channel miniseries tracking the early radical movement in Boston (Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere) and how it shaped America.
• The Crossing (2000) – I haven't seen this, and can't find it on streaming. But apparently, it's a movie where Jeff Daniels stars as George Washington about the crossing of the Delaware River and the Battle of Trenton.
• Benedict Arnold: A Matter of Honor (2003) – Another one that's hard to find, Aidan Quinn and Kelsey Grammer star in a television film exploring America's most famous betrayal from a psychological and military standpoint.
• Revolution (1985) – People say the director's cut is awesome, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So I watched the regular version, which is pretty to look at but lacks a story. Al Pacino’s gritty, muddy, hyper-realistic street-level look at the chaos and dirt of the war, heavily re-evaluated in its Director’s Cut.
• Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) – Also couldn't find it to stream, but this early movie was directed by John Ford and stars Henry Fonda. This classic focuses on frontier settlers trying to defend their valley homes from British-aligned raids in upstate New York.
• The Devil's Disciple (1959) – Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier lead a sharp, satirical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play set during the Saratoga campaign.
• Johnny Tremain (1957) – A book many of us were forced to read in school, this is the Disney version of the war. We follow a young silversmith caught up in the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington.

Summing Up the Genre

The ultimate takeaway from studying these films is that we don't have a ton of them. I know there have been a few over the years, but if you were trying to do a historical epic, maybe this is a good place to try.

What's your absolute favorite movie about the American Revolution?

Let us know in the comments below!