Braveheart Was Somewhat Dumber Than I Remembered

To prepare to write about Edward I and Scotland, I decided I needed to re-watch Braveheart. Fun fact: Braveheart was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. (My mom rented it for me on VHS and then told me when to cover my eyes for the dirty and/or violent parts [and thanks to Braveheart's battle-buttockery, there actually was a point to which both "dirty" and "violent" applied].) But I hadn't seen it since, so last week I checked me out a copy from the library.

As the title of this post indicates, it was somewhat dumber than I remembered. And I'm not even counting what might be the most obvious dumb thing: William Wallace impregnating the Princess of Wales. In fact, that I enjoyed for its soap operatic hilariousness. I also tried to mostly ignore timeline difficulties--for instance, in the year the real Wallace died, 1305, Isabella of France (whom the fictional Wallace knocked up) was not yet married to the future Edward II. Or living in England. And she was ten years old. But again, oh well. Here are the main things that did bother me:

#4: Some of the battles (particularly the first one in that village right after the English kill Mrs. Braveheart) are just Monty Pythonesque in the hilariously untenable ways that Scottish dudes kill English dudes.

#3: The whole "primae noctis" thing--besides the fact that it never existed--has no point in the narrative. Wallace claims near the end of the movie that it was the reason he and Mrs. Braveheart hid their marriage, but that's not true. They hid it because her father disapproved of him. Remember? The beginning of the movie? When her father disapproved of him?

#2: "Freedom!"? Really? When serfdom was in full swing? That battle cry would have been beyond meaningless to those destitute Scottish dirt farmers.

#1: Wallace wins Isabella over for good by revealing that Longshanks did, like, bad stuff. Like when he took over cities, he'd like, kill people. This was the only part of the film that actually made me angry, because it was the Fourteenth Century. This was hundreds of years before they stopped chopping criminals up and hanging the bits up around major towns. How could Isabella possibly have been shocked and appalled by the fact that bad things happened in wars when she would have seen rotting decapitated heads every time she went anywhere in London? COME ON.

The way things really were is showcased in the execution scene, where everybody brings their kids down to have a fun day watching a man die an excruciating death. Now that was how people rolled in the Middle Ages.