Even though it won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as earning $213 million at the box office, the reputation of Braveheart has slowly been eroding over time.
These days, you’re a lot more likely to find Mel Gibson’s sprawling epic on lists of the worst movies to ever win the biggest prizes at the Oscars, never mind the fact you could bet your house on it showing up on virtually every ranking of the most historically inaccurate feature films in Hollywood history, although Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC should at least prevent it from ever being first.
Sure, it plays incredibly fast and exceedingly loose with the real-life events that inspired its blood-soaked and battle-weary story, but you know what? Scottish people do not care, even in the slightest. Despite his questionable behavior over the years, Gibson is still revered as something of a local hero in the country, for the sole reason that you’d have to look very hard to find a true Scot that doesn’t adore Braveheart.
You can probably put two and two together and extrapolate just how this writer remains so incredibly and unequivocally confident in the ironclad belief that despite getting its history so very, very, almost laughably wrong, the blockbuster tale of William Wallace fighting back against his cultural and societal oppressors will always have a special place in the heart of the nation in which it takes place.
If you ever find yourself in Scotland for any reason, go to a bar on a Friday or Saturday night near closing time and shout “FREEDOM!!!!” just to see what happens. Outside of that, though, streaming subscribers remain won over by its questionable adherence to things that actually happened, with FlixPatrol outing Braveheart as one of iTunes’ biggest hits this weekend.