The last few weeks, I’ve had people say to me “I can’t wait to read your review of Melania!” Presumably, they want me to tear it to shreds in an entertaining manner. That’s my job as a movie critic, after all.
But I am not going to write about Melania, for a variety of reasons. First off, I’ve been iced in my house for the last eight days, thanks to the monster winter storm that has devastated the Southeast. So I couldn’t have made it to a movie theater even if I wanted to. Which brings me to the second reason: I don’t want to watch Melania. The Trump family has managed to inject itself into every facet of American life for a freakin’ decade. Why would I spend money to watch those evil freaks on the big screen? Third, I have done my time in the Brett Ratner salt mines. Rush Hour 3 and X-Men: The Last Stand were hot garbage. Ratner, who went to “director jail” in 2017 after being credibly accused of sexual assault and harassment by several of his female co-workers, including Olivia Munn and pre-transition Elliot Page, has never even directed a documentary before. But that doesn’t matter to Amazon, because, fourth reason, this isn’t even a movie in the conventional sense. It’s a money laundering operation for a bribe, wrapped up in a big propaganda bow.
Instead, I will be reviewing the most important television series of the decade: Ken Burns’ The American Revolution.
Burns is our greatest living documentary filmmaker, and has been for a long time. Nobody has the depth of material that Burns has produced over the 35 years since The Civil War became a national phenomenon in 1990. Alongside epics about World War II and the Vietnam War, there are the superbly researched musical series Jazz and Country Music. He’s the master painter of the big picture, but I’m partial to his more focused work like The Roosevelts and Prohibition. Burns’ biggest strength is his clarity, which sounds easy, but is in fact devilishly difficult.
Coming just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, The American Revolution aims to bring into focus the whole sweep of the war the participants called the most significant historical event since the birth of Jesus Christ. Burns, along with co-directors David Schmidt and longtime collaborator Sarah Botstein, are on a mission to look at our founding mythology with clear eyes and exhaustive scholarship. The team cuts through centuries of Founding Fathers hagiography without diminishing their achievements. The story begins during the French and Indian War, when George Washington was the leader of the Virginia Regiment. At Fort Necessity in what is now Pennsylvania, he suffered his first military defeat. It would not be his last. Washington’s greatest talent as a general, it turns out, was his ability to lead his troops in an orderly retreat. Time and again, the Continental Army absorbed blows that would have destroyed any other fighting force. Washington’s key insight during the fight against the British was that he didn’t have to win — he just had to lose more slowly than the enemy. That’s because the Americans lived here, and the British soldiers charged with oppressing them were tourists dependent on a long, expensive supply line. Two centuries later, Ho Chi Minh would teach the lesson of Washington to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
The event that put the colonies on the road to revolution was the Boston Massacre. In 1770, British troops were occupying the city and making a general nuisance of themselves. Citizens banded together to taunt the hated redcoats, and one day, a crowd throwing snowballs was met with musket fire, killing eight people. From there, trust in the British government was shattered; instead of bending the knee to the monarch, Americans banded together for mutual aid. Five years later, Paul Revere, who had witnessed the massacre, was a part of a ring of citizens called the Sons of Liberty, who kept watch over the British troops. When the British moved by night to secure an outpost in Concord, Revere and his compatriots rode ahead of the army, warning citizens along the way that the British were coming. The American militias assembled and ambushed the redcoats, kicking off the Revolution proper.
The irony of slaveholders adopting “all men are created equal” as their motto is not lost on Burns. But the Revolution had a way of changing people. As one historian puts it, every decision Washington made early on benefitted him personally; it just so happened that those decisions made him George Washington. To a certain extent, the Enlightenment values of the Revolution were propaganda to get people to fight. But the fight made people think deeply about the concept of “freedom,” and how to make, as Lincoln said, a more perfect Union. The Founders’ words outstripped their deeds, and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since.
It’s hard not to see parallels between the early days of the Revolution and what has been happening in Minneapolis since Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot by ICE. Once again, a leaderless group of natives are pitted against an occupying force ravaging the community in the name of “order.” In 1775, resistance to the king was spurred by Revere’s woodcuts of the Boston Massacre. In 2026, we have short form videos shared on social media. The Washington Post reported that 34,000 people signed up for ICE Watch in the weeks since Good’s killing. There are only about 3,000 federal agents in the state of Minnesota. George Washington would like those odds.
The American Revolution is now showing on WKNO-TV and streaming on PBS+.