Starring William Franklyn-Miller

I have been fully engaged in the hype surrounding this movie for the past months. But was it worth taking over my algorithm?

For those of you who aren’t history nerds, there was a LOT of drama in George Washington’s early life. He was in his 40s when the American Revolution began and was already renowned as a hero of the French and Indian War. The movie follows the early storyline and is more Last of the Mohicans than The Patriot.

In a nutshell, Young Washington follows George as he grapples with ambition. But while the New World may be different geographically, English ways are firmly entrenched. With his father’s death, George has no prospects. The royal commission he covets is unattainable as he has no formal education, isn’t a landowner, and doesn’t have the money or connections to purchase a commission. So he sets out to prove his worth, even though he knows the British aristocracy is using him. 

The movie sets up so much foreshadowing for the American Revolution twenty years later and really puts into focus how radical George Washington and the Founding Fathers were. Liberty was a foreign concept. The British were secure in their arrogance because it worked. No one dared challenge the status quo. Honestly, the more I study the American Revolution, the more clear it is that our liberty is a Divine miracle. 

Pros: Give me the frontier! I loved the emphasis on the French and Indian War and how that shaped George Washington. The character arc was fantastic and I really liked how the script wove in the maxims George had learned as a child. The foreshadowing and hard-hitting lines were well done. There were clever nods to the cherry tree legend, but nothing that had me screaming “that didn’t happen!” Overall, it followed what I remember from George’s life and reignited a desire to learn more about him.

Cons: It was not The Patriot and it was not The Last of the Mohicans. There were plenty of moments where I ground my teeth because seasons/weather didn’t line up, there were occasional anachronistic words/phrases, guns didn’t need to be reloaded, and there was poorly spliced source music. The not-so-casually inserted land acknowledgments also had me rolling my eyes. To be fair, I am more of a history nerd than the average watcher, but if you’re using that much CGI/AI for scenes, you could have at least made it look like hot, sweltering July. And I don’t think powder horns would have broke the budget.

Is it worth seeing? Yes. Is it a drop-everything-and-go-to-the-theater movie? No. But I will say that George Washington was an incredible man and it is a shame and a shock that more movies haven’t been made about his life. He is a hero to emulate. And for that reason alone, we should not only watch this movie, but should also do a deep dive into learning more about him (from good sources). 

The Bottom Line: Before he was president, before he was a general, George Washington was an ordinary young man with a dream.