Braveheart, A Review, and musings on "Brutal Medieval Warfare"

Maybe the last of the truly great Mel Gibson movies, before he let his personal life ruin his career. Braveheart is universally espoused as an excellent movie. It's an action movie to beat other actions movies. It's a romantic drama to beat other romantic dramas. It's historical. It's epic. It's cross-genre in a way that's very convenient when you're trying to choose something to watch with one or more other people. It's well written. It's well acted. It's long, but not obnoxiously so. It involves men throwing swords, and wearing skirts.

My own copy of Braveheart is on VHS. And I noticed something interesting on the jacket. It's rated R "for brutal medieval warfare". When I was young, there were only a handful of reasons for a movie rating: nudity, partial nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, violence and language. That was about it. Every movie that was PG, PG-13 or R basically was justified with some permutation of those. And then Braveheart came along. I imagine that the fine folk at the MPAA were thinking something like, "'violence' doesn't really do this justice." And so a totally new justification was born. And once they had used their creative juices, those juices started to flow. It seems like every movie these days has a completely new justification: "Bullying", "Cartoonish violence", "Space battles." And it all started with Braveheart (as far as I can tell).