There's something about the spectacle of hundreds of people in period clothing all running at each other that CGI still hasn't managed to capture. No amount of modeling, crowd-cloning, or crazy specific detailing seems capable of convincing my eyes that what I'm seeing isn't at least a little bit a put on. Which is mostly fine, except that what these scenes always seem to want is a gravity and power and verisimilitude that convinces people we are actually watching a bunch of dudes about to kill each other. They can't ever just give completely into the idea of it as a fantasy, and their desire to trick us makes the scenes even less powerful than they are. So, that is the benefit of Braveheart. It is, probably, the last movie to show huge groups of people with such a minimal amount of special effects (if any), that it really does look like huge swaths of men charging into one another. It makes the battle scenes believably dirty, violent and like there is something real at stake for the upstart Scotsmen fighting for FREEDOM.
Unfortunately, there's the whole rest of the movie. Having watched this now, Gibson's weirdo beliefs should've been apparent miles away. How did everyone else miss it back then? Gibson and his Scottish cohorts as bristling, masculine ideals of rugged, uncompromising manliness. The king's son as a flustered, gay child who deserves to have his lover thrown out the window and to be cuckolded by the sensitive, yet impassioned, sexually amazing and absolutely 100% not gay William Wallace. Not to mention not-so-subtle ideas that even the most prim, proper and upright of women cannot keep their legs closed for the testosterone-y, probably musky smelling, men of the earth. His strange gender attitudes, homophobia, xenophobia, unbridled emotion, it is all on display here for everyone to see. And it is, in its own insidious way, nearly as ugly as everything we know about the man now.
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