General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Revolution (1985 film)

Revolution is a 1985 historical war drama directed by Hugh Hudson, starring Al Pacino as a New York fur trapper drawn into the American Revolutionary War after his son is conscripted into the British Army by Sergeant Major Peasy (Donald Sutherland). Produced by Irwin Winkler from a screenplay by Robert Dillon and financed by the British company Goldcrest Films International, it was one of the most expensive films of its year and one of its most conspicuous failures, grossing a few hundred thousand dollars against a $28 million budget.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	25 December 1985 (Christmas Day), United States and United Kingdom³
Director / writer	Hugh Hudson; screenplay by Robert Dillon¹
Principal cast	Al Pacino (Tom Dobb), Donald Sutherland (Sgt. Maj. Peasy), Nastassja Kinski (Daisy McConnahay), Joan Plowright, Dexter Fletcher (Ned Dobb)⁴
Budget / box office	$28 million budget; $358,574 worldwide gross²
Critical scores	10% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (21 reviews); Metascore 22 on Metacritic; 5.3/10 on IMDb¹^•⁵
Awards	Razzie nominations for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Actor; the Stinker's Bad Movie Award of 1985⁶
Later cut	Hudson re-edited the film and Pacino recorded new narration for a director's cut that ran shorter than the theatrical version; BFI Video issued it in 2012⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The plot centers on Tom Dobb, a fur trapper from New York who is drawn against his will into the Revolutionary War once Sergeant Major Peasy, the story's antagonist, conscripts his son Ned into military service. Tom tries to find his son and gradually decides he must take a stand and fight for the freedom of the Colonies, alongside the aristocratic rebel Daisy McConnahay.⁹ The narrative spans the war's early years and picks up again three years later in the middle of the Battle of Yorktown.¹⁰

Hudson described the film as an anti-war story seen from the bottom echelon of life, fundamentally about a father and a son finding a voice, and said he never wanted it to be about history as such.¹¹ Critics nonetheless read it against the historical record: Variety wrote that the film "doesn't tell a story so much as it uses characters to illustrate what the American Revolution has come to mean," while Time noted its setting in New York and Pennsylvania in 1776 to 1781 and its apparent intent to analogize the Vietnam War.⁵

Production

Hudson came to the project after the success of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984).⁷ The shoot was difficult. Pacino, then 45, developed pneumonia during the first two months of filming, in March and April 1985, in dank conditions in King's Lynn, Norfolk; Hudson had wanted the film wet and muddy to show how tough conditions were for soldiers. Extras walked off in protest one afternoon and were replaced by volunteers rounded up locally, and Nastassja Kinski went absent for several days while visiting her boyfriend in Paris.³

A rushed release. Although Hudson was known as a perfectionist, the studio pressured him to have the film ready by December so it could qualify for year-end awards. He was forced to finish the story quickly, and the studio, disliking the downbeat ending, required a happy ending to be tacked on.⁷ Hudson later explained the pressure from the production side: Goldcrest was overextended on three big films that had all gone over budget, needed income, and "we were the one that took the rap."¹¹ He had also wanted to make Revolution as a silent film with narration or cards, an idea he said was laughed out of court.¹¹

The crew included composer John Corigliano, cinematographer Bernard Lutic, editor Stuart Baird, and production designer Assheton Gorton.¹² Lutic shot the film in a process called System 35, and reviewers repeatedly singled out the visuals: the Christian Science Monitor called it "dazzlingly shot" but found the visual grandeur embarrassing against a messy dramatic element.⁵

Reception

Released on 25 December 1985, the film was "half-baked and fully incomprehensible" in The Independent's retrospective summary, and reviewers "duly feasted on its carcass." Time Out asked, "Director? I didn't catch the credit. Was there one?" and Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it "a mess, but one that's so giddily misguided that it's sometimes a good deal of fun for all of the wrong reasons."³ Peter Travers, in People Magazine, called it "the worst movie of 1985."⁶

The numbers record the scale of the failure. The film earned $358,574 worldwide against a $28 million budget.² Rotten Tomatoes lists a US gross of $295.3K,¹ while The Independent reports it "ultimately earning just $350,000";³ the two figures describe slightly different measures of the same commercial collapse. On aggregate sites it scored 10% on the Tomatometer and a Metascore of 22, with 0 positive, 6 mixed, and 7 negative reviews counted by Metacritic.¹^•⁵ It was nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Actor at the Razzie Awards and received the Stinker's Bad Movie Award of 1985.⁶

Consequences. The abject box office performance effectively bankrupted its British production company Goldcrest.¹³ Pacino was so appalled that he stayed away from film for four years, working on Broadway before returning to the screen in Harold Becker's Sea of Love (1989). "They put half a film out," he said in a later public interview. "I was appalled and shocked by that... It was that single film that took the rug out from under me."³ Hudson's career as a big-time director was, in the same account, effectively over.³

Reassessment and the director's cut

Over time the film was given another look. Hudson re-edited it and had Pacino record a whole new narration for the director's cut, which, contrary to usual practice, ran shorter than the theatrical cut; by the late 2010s, Turner Classic Movies could write that "the consensus is that Revolution is a lot better than people once thought."⁷ The Guardian's review of the 2012 DVD called the new cut "much improved" and an atmospheric depiction of soldiers' lives in the Revolutionary War, despite its flaws.⁵ The BBFC classified the 2012 home-entertainment version at 121m 18s, distributed by BFI Video, alongside a 110m 43s bonus-material reel.⁸

The film's commercial history also had a small afterlife in music: RCA Records canceled its planned Revolution soundtrack after the film failed, and the masters, thought lost, were found mislabelled in a vault in 2007 and issued on CD by Varèse Sarabande in 2009.²

Place in American Revolution films

The American War of Independence has been largely neglected in feature films, a point film historians have called one of the curious facts of the genre.¹⁴ One account of Hollywood's treatment of the Revolution notes that since the United States bicentennial in 1976, only two major films made or partly financed by Hollywood feature the events of the Revolution in a meaningful way: Hudson's Revolution (1985) and Roland Emmerich's The Patriot (2000).¹³ Revolution's failure is part of why the subject stayed dormant for fifteen years afterward, and scholars of Hollywood history films treat the two movies together as the main case studies of how American cinema handles its founding war.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026