Young Washington: A Review

The director of photography makes the Ohio backwoods look like Ohio backwoods, and when Fort Necessity is built in the wrong place—historically, the wrong place—you see it happen, then watch it get overrun. That single tactical blunder by a young, ambitious colonial officer touched off a broader conflict between the French and British that initiated the French and Indian War, which ended with Britain victorious, the Americans taxed to pay for it, and the American Revolution following. Young Washington, the surprise hit from Angel Studios, tells that untold earlier story.

The Central Argument: Ambition Thwarted by a Class System

The movie's driving tension is George Washington's burning ambition to rise—and the British system that refuses to let him. Washington was not born poor, but he was not born noble either. He was a colonial, and that was the problem. The film portrays his constant struggle against the fact that he could not get a commission in the actual British army simply because of his birth. As the reviewer puts it, "that's the basis of the American Revolution" — not abstract French revolutionary ideas about natural rights, but the concrete British rights that colonials were denied precisely because they were colonials. This is Edmund Burke's historical case, and the movie gets it right on screen.