Onetime French and Indian War hero, Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) is a recently widowed father of seven, raising his family on a South Carolina estate in the politically tumultuous year of 1776. Ben may not be the slightest bit religious or the least bit southern for that matter, but his eldest son Gabriel (Heath Ledger - 10 Things I Hate About You) at least shares their ideological disunity by way of the actors’ shared Australian heritage which also ironically connects The Patriot to The Gladiator by way of fellow Aussie Russell Crowe. Martin has renounced fighting in the Revolutionary War in favor of raising his family away from bloodshed. But it isn’t long before fierce Republican patriotism reels Martin into the bloody fray of battle after a British regiment, led by the unmerciful Colonel William Tavington (Jason Isaacs - Armageddon), murders of one of Martin’s sons and burns his mansion to the ground. Tavington’s personal obsession with crushing Martin is analogous to Commodus’ (Joaquin Phoenix) preoccupation with quelling Maxiumas (Russell Crowe) in Gladiator.

Martin reverts to his bloodthirsty past by staging a vicious ambush against the departing regiment before taking up arms to lead a rag tag rebel Militia, including his son Gabriel, into battle against the relentless English army. The story unravels through British atrocities waged against families of the militiamen before ending at the Revolutionary War’s decisive battle of Cowpens where General Cornwallis was defeated by French and American forces.

Clunky script devices continually squeak and rattle throughout the movie. Glaring is the film’s pitiful attempt at black and white race relation revisionism. Martin’s militia harbors a token black man serving in the troop to fulfill a 12-month timeline that will grant him freedom from slavery. By watching this film for historical context, an audience gets no sense of the tensions that sent this country into civil war briefly after the end of the Revolutionary War. During a one-week furlough, Martin and Gabriel recover from battling the English Army with their family and black slaves at a makeshift refugee camp. The former slaves wear traditional African garb and play ridiculously inappropriate Caribbean music on unseen musical instruments — except for a makeshift xylophone. The whole sequence comes off as an excuse for the filmmakers to glad-hand minorities who have spent ten bucks to watch Mel Gibson kick some British butt.

The Patriot is a Mel Gibson (Mad Max) movie, even more so than Saving Private Ryan was a Tom Hanks’ film. Both movies were penned by screenwriter Robert Rodat who bows reverently to The Patriot’s martyred leading character with radiant attention. Gibson is a perfect choice for Rodat’s amalgamated war hero because he embodies a Humphrey Bogart style of acting craftsman and popularity with American audiences that obscure things like any inkling that he could hail from the south. Gibson can perfectly walk a tightrope over any dramatic context with artless skill. In The Patriot, ex-patriot Australian Gibson resembles more of a Ronald Reagan cum Christopher Walken doing a tightrope tap dance over Rodat’s flawed dramatic theme:

"You can’t save your own family unless you are willing to put yourself on the line to save the families of all men."

There’s no getting past the idea that Hollywood will be spitting out more post modern genre splitting movies with lots of crowd pleasing over-the-top action sequences. Think Politician, or The Murderer, or Bandit to come along and subvert the genres of social satire, suspense, and the western, respectively. For Hollywood, capitalist cinema has become an abstraction bereft of sex, religion, or individuality beyond mob mentality pap. When a cannonball flies directly toward the camera in The Patriot, you can easily see just who is the real target.

The story is set after 3028 when Earth is destroyed by vicious aliens called "the Drej." Cale, one of Earth’s few surviving humans, is disenfranchised youth now working as a second-class minority with a bunch of lowlife aliens on a crummy salvage station after having been abandoned by his father when Earth hit the fan. Cale is recruited by a manipulative peer of his father named Korso, ship commander of the "Valkyre," to help locate the "Titan," a giant spaceship that holds the secret to salvation of the human race. Korso reveals that the ring Cale’s father gave him before he abandoned him is a genetically encoded map leading to the Titan.

To say ‘you know what happens next’ would be a vast understatement. The a to b to c plot is as thoroughly boring as its soundtrack is vomit inducing, due to syrupy rock songs like "Cosmic Castaway" (Electrasy) or "It’s My Turn To Fly" (The Urge). The colorful and exotic animation spectacle may be fascinating to look at for the first twenty minutes, but the movie would fair far better if it consisted only of background action without the encumbrance of silly characters, pandering dialogue, and gross soundtrack.

The adage about too many cooks spoiling the soup could not hold more true than in "Titan A.E." Screenwriters John August (Go), Ben Edlund (The Tick) and Joss Whedon (Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) distilled the script from a story by Hans Bauer and Randall McCormick. It’s probable that, if left alone, Whedon would have cranked out a decent script based on his brilliant work on Toy Story. But the inclusion of hack writer John August, whose garbage heap script for Go was one of the worst screenplays ever written, along with newcomer Ben Edlund obviously tipped the scales of writing duties to the wrong side of success.

Titan A.E. producers/directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (Anastasia) have gone on at length about their film’s back-slapping message about the ‘indomitable human spirit’ and ‘the search for identity." They propose that their cartoon movie queries its audience: ‘Are we worth saving?’ ‘Can we ever have a home again?’ It could be argued that writer/director Trey Parker posed the very same questions with last year’s parody feature South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. In response to South Park an audience might answer; ‘Not really, but if I can keep having this much fun at the expense of people who don’t deserve the time of day, then O.K., there might be something worth hoping for." Whether kids and adults will agree on Titan A.E.’s false bottom message is doubtful. By the end of Titan A.E. I personally hoped the evil Drej would blow the last bastion of humanity to smithereens. After all, it looked really cool when they blew up the Earth and Sci-fi has come to mean, by definition, nothing more than a series of really big explosions leading to redemption of the human race by the efforts of a good-looking white kid. Yawn.