‘The Patriot’ at 25: Mel Gibson Brought His ‘Braveheart’ Bravado to U.S. Shores for Independence Day

This year, the big Fourth of July weekend movie is a new installment in the Jurassic World series, and will likely draw crowds looking for some summer-season fun. There’s nothing explicitly patriotic about watching dinosaurs eat people (though maybe it does deserve national-pastime status), but then, thematic Independence Day releases are very much a thing of the past. I’m not actually talking about Independence Day itself, though obviously that was an enormous success. But 25 years ago, Independence Day director Roland Emmerich returned to explicitly holiday-themed entertainment with The Patriot, a Revolutionary War drama that became one of the only such hits in recent history.

At the time, Emmerich, too, was recently in thrall of the dinosaurs-eating-people genre; he had just directed an American Godzilla remake that was essentially a Jurassic Park knockoff, complete with baby Godzillas swapped in for velociraptors. The movie was not a success with critics or audiences, and Emmerich pivoted to something more serious than aliens or mutant lizards: a screenplay from Robert Rodat, credited author of the Saving Private Ryan script. For the first time, Emmerich was directing a screenplay without a credit from either himself or his creative partner Dean Devlin (Devlin produced The Patriot, after which the pair mostly went their separate ways).

But the more dominant new voice on The Patriot may have been star Mel Gibson, possibly before he even got there. Gibson didn’t rewrite the movie, but it sounds as if it was rewritten to attract his interest, with a lead character whose number of children matched Gibson’s own family and a very Braveheart-y story about a man who abstains from war only to be drawn into battle (and prove himself a brilliant and brutal tactician) in service of revenge. It is also, perhaps more to the point, a movie about the barbaric loathsomeness of the English.

Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina colonist drawn into the war after British soldiers murder one of his sons; Heath Ledger plays an older son who joins the Continental Army before his father does. Like a lot of Gibson vehicles, the movie is positioned to inflict maximum torture on his character so he can snap into the most righteous and bloody retaliation. Braveheart gave this formula the patina of importance; it won a bunch of Oscars, after all. So The Patriot turns on the odd spectacle of a filmmaker clumsily imitating an already-clumsy movie in front of its maker, Emmerich doing his best to cover the Mel Gibson ahistorical-atrocity epic and go further into playing the part of the old-fashioned master of Hollywood spectacle.

Indeed, The Patriot is something of an outlier in what might be termed Emmerich’s Patriotism Trilogy. Independence Day and the later Die Hard knockoff White House Down are both fantasies (ID4 in part and White House Down in full) about a sensitive and reasonable U.S. president asserting himself, and a whitewashed version of U.S. values, in a chaotic world of violence. They’re two of Emmerich’s more successful films because of how they’re able to make something cornily rousing out of the president fighting back; his more pure disaster-movie run-throughs like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 eventually wind up coming across like free-floating destruction. Though Emmerich is German-born, there’s a perverse patriotism – probably further fueled by his outsider status – in mounting expensive spectacle that can only truly take on the necessary weight by roping in a U.S. president to command the action.

In The Patriot, that presidential figure is Gibson, which tracks with his prominence a quarter-century ago; 2000 also saw the release of the rom-com What Women Want, which makes it perhaps the most commercially successful year of his career. Gibson is also the biggest star Emmerich has ever worked with by a fairly wide margin, and his presence makes this the only Emmerich movie that overloads on gravitas, rather than floating away on their own insubstantiality as the actors or material fail to provide proper counterweight. Gibson often pitches himself uncomfortably between righteous fury and goofy shtick, which, come to think of it, makes him a more fitting presidential allegory for 2025 than the waning years of the Clinton presidency.  (After all, Gibson is one of Trump’s chosen ambassadors to Hollywood, whatever that means.)

Maybe that’s why The Patriot, which should be a straight shot to the heart of Independence Day rewatches, has never surpassed Independence Day, or many far less overt July 4th-themed pictures (like Yankee Doodle Dandy, a TCM perennial) as far as seasonal rewatches go. The other movies in Emmerich’s patriotism trilogy march through their pageantry with the steadiness (and impermanence) of a holiday parade. 160 minutes of The Patriot lingers in Mad Mel’s soldier cosplay, grim while nonetheless lacking the battle-worn drama of Rodat’s Private Ryan. In a way, though, it’s the purest expression of Emmerich’s dual citizenship: a European’s understandable attempt to Learn American by doing what they’ve seen.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn, podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com, and contributing at Patse, The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.