Young Washington - A Movie Review

As Supergirl tanks badly at the summer 2026 box office, another film is quietly building an audience and has actually found some favor with 'professional' reviewers, like the egg-sucking leftist bunch over at rogerebert.com. How could a jingoistic neocon low budget flick tossed together by a studio known mostly for cheap holy roller shlock - Angel Studios - pull this off? Well they could, and they did. 

The movie is Young Washington. Let's get the 'holy roller' stuff off the table right up front. There's nary a trace of overt Christianity in this movie. Washington never goes down on bended knee asking for divine guidance, there are no preachers, no bibles, nobody invokes the Lord's name. Nothing. The only visible Christian symbol, other than crosses on a few church steeples, comes at the end of the movie when Washington is parlaying with a group of Indians. One of the chiefs is wearing a sash that carries what is clearly a Christian cross. Washington shows no interest in it, doesn't even notice it.

Yet Young Washington is clearly anchored in Christian values - devotion to family, morality, duty, honesty, service. So in that sense, it's a very Christian movie. It works because that's what Washington was - a very moral and honest man who understood his duty and responsibilities to his family, his soldiers and his nation. 

The movie also mercifully excludes any 'girl boss' bullshit. Women of the mid-18th century are accurately portrayed as to their roles in society and the challenges they faced. We're also not subjected to what I'll call the 'sharp negro' syndrome, where the wily slaves outwit and make fools of their masters and other white characters. Blacks are portrayed as precisely what they were in the mid-18th century - cheap and often expendable labor. Sorry if that offends, folks. That's history.

Young Washington is blessed (see, there's that religious thing again) with a great story to build on, great screenwriters, a great cast, and a first rate director, cinematographer, set designers and costuming crews. It's not a perfect movie - in my book it gets 4 out of 5 stars. There are some minor dialog issues, some overly long battle scenes that could have used tighter editing, and some obvious mistakes with weaponry. The surveying scenes are a joke. I used to be a surveyor, and have an strong interest in the history of surveying, so I know. But I can forgive all of these quibbles given the overall quality of the movie.

Let's discuss the stand-outs in the cast. George is played by British actor William Franklyn-Miller (what's with these pretentious hyphenated names among the acting set?). He does a great job as the main character and holds the movie together. I think he accurately captures the young Washington - inexperienced, ambitious, over-reaching, yet set with a strong moral core and a willingness to learn from his mistakes.

Mary-Louise Parker as Washington's struggling mother gives the strongest performance of the movie. She is absolutely superb in the role. Her angst, almost desperation, to keep a plantation running while raising two boys (George and his younger brother) highlights the struggles of many women shouldering enormous responsibilities within the confines of mid-18th century colonial America.

Ben Kingsley plays Robert Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of the colony of Virginia, and the man who gives Washington his start on a military career. Kingsley is incapable of giving a bad performance in any movie.  Although he sort of loafs through this one, he still turns in a great performance as an upper-crust British aristocrat who at first looks down on Washington as an inexperienced colonial bumpkin with a lot of pretentions (which he was), but gradually sees the potential in this young man as a leader and someone who can make a quick study of a situation and adjust as necessary. 

Mia Rogers plays the young Sally Fairfax, Washington's first love. Rogers plays her role expertly - someone drawn to the brash young Washington, yet always understanding that she's little more than a prize, or a pawn, in the colonial Virginia high society/high stakes marriage game. She loves Washington but understands he can never compete with the more eligible suitors vying for her hand. In real life, Washington apparently never got over her. As Mia Rogers plays her, I can understand why.

John Foss plays George's older half-brother, Lawrence Washington. This role is key to understanding Washington and what he became. After their father's death, the British educated Lawrence took George under his wing and became his teacher, mentor and surrogate father. It's fair to say that without Lawrence's guidance, George Washington would be just another footnote in a tidewater Virginia family history, and we'd very likely have remained part of the British empire.

There is rumor that, based on the success of Young Washington, Angel Studios is considering making this movie the first of a three part series. I hope they do, because there is so much more of George Washington's story left to tell. Of course we a know (or should know) about his struggles at Valley Forge, the crossing of the Delaware River and the Battle of Trenton, and the final siege at Yorktown. Those are the stories that gave us George Washington the iconic hero. But the 20 years between the 1755 Battle of the Monongahela, where Washington finally finds his footing as a field commander, and 1775, when Congress appoints him as the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, is the period that made George Washington the man. 

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I Think I'll Do A Movie Review

I've seen a lot of crappy movies in the past 6 months, both in theaters and on-line. Some, like The Mandalorian, I knew would be crap because the streaming series is crap, and the movie is just a couple of the TV episodes stitched together. But my wife likes the series (mainly for baby Yoda) so I went. I wasn't disappointed - it was crap. Then there's Nuremburg, with Russel Crowe and Rami Malek. In every scene they had together, Crowe mopped the floor with Malek. It wasn't so much that Crowe was the better actor (he was), but that the story the writers delivered had so much made-up psycho-babble drivel that Malek didn't have much to work with. The same could be said for every other character in the movie that wasn't Hermann Goering. All the other movies were so 'blah' that it's hard to just remember them.

I had been following the talk about the movie Pressure for several months. I'm very familiar with the movie's subject - the struggle to deliver an accurate D-Day weather forecast to General Eisenhower and his commanders. The story of the development of this forecast, and the decisions Eisenhower made based on these forecasts, is one of the fascinating pieces of the history of D-Day. It's also a story that's been well understood by historians for over 80 years. So nobody wanting to tell the story on film has to guess or make anything up. It's all there in the history books, and it's a fascinating tale with a number of intersecting scientific and military components. More than enough history material to fill a movie screen for two hours.

The story of the D-Day weather forecasts also has a huge built in audience. Every weather geek and every WWII history buff  - a combined audience of millions - would stand in line to see a well crafted story. And this is just in the US. A well done movie would play well in theaters in the UK, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This story is, after all, part of the story of their liberation from the Nazis. This is also a story where everyone gets to be a hero. There are no bad guys in this tale, just struggles to understand what the data is presenting, and then trying to fit the invasion around the only factor the Allies can't control - the weather.

So the writers and the director (who was part of the writing team) had a great story with plenty of historical resources. Those resources were not just facts and figures; there's also a lot of well done study on how Eisenhower and his senior commanders made the almost hour-by-hour decisions based on the developing weather picture. The decision processes they went through are fascinating, and are still studied today. But it's as though the movie production team didn't want to be bothered reading the material and building the story from it. Instead they got lazy and set up a fictitious personality conflict between the leading meteorologist, Group Captain Stagg, and an American meteorologist, Lieutenant Colonel Krick. By focusing on this conflict, the director almost completely misses the historical context and importance of the contributions these meteorologist made to the success of D-Day.

My problems with this movie go beyond just a crappy story crappily told. Let's start with the cast. With just one exception the primary cast is excellent. Let's get the really good ones out of the way. Damian Lewis, who played Major Dick Winters in the series Band of Brothers, plays Field Marshall Montgomery. Lewis understood his character better than any other cast member, and plays Montgomery to a 'T'. His is the standout performance in the movie. Kerry Condon plays Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's personal driver, secretary, confidant and, OK, alleged lover. While Condon's role in the movie is fictitious, she plays it wonderfully, as the steadying influence standing between Eisenhower and Stagg. Yes, she's a made-up plot device, but it works.

But now we have to talk about Brendan Fraser. I like the guy, I really do. He's a talented actor (and has an Oscar to show for it), but  Eisenhower just wasn't his role. To start, Fraser is still struggling with his weight. He looks bloated. Eisenhower was trim, with an athletic build. Next, Fraser just didn't seem to understand his character. Eisenhower, even when under enormous pressure (like the lead-up to D-Day) was calm and collected. He didn't yell at subordinates. He knew he needed to project an air of confidence and strong leadership to his staff and the thousands of American and British soldiers under his command. He had history altering decisions to make, and he knew that shouting and berating his staff was counter-productive. Unfortunately Fraser spends a lot of time shouting. Perhaps the worst interpretation of Eisenhower was the scene where Fraser re-creates Ike's D-Day 'Great Crusade' address to the troops. Eisenhower recorded it ahead of time for later broadcast, but most soldiers and sailors received it as a printed message handed to them on the evening of the invasion. Broadcasting the address to the ships would have alerted the Germans that the invasion was imminent. Yet the movie has Fraser, as Eisenhower, shouting into a microphone as the address is broadcast live to the invasion fleet just off the coast. Didn't happen. Perhaps it's unfair to blame Fraser for this - maybe he was just playing the scene as the director told him to. But Ike's recorded address was delivered in his deliberate, clipped, midwestern voice. Fraser would have done well to follow that example, rather than yelling in his naturally shrill voice. I guess the production team just had to put their own spin on the event, and the result is awful. About the only thing Fraser got right was Eisenhower's smoking. Ike was a chain smoker, and the habit eventually led to his death. A lot of actors today have difficulty faking the smoking habit - the 'affectation' of smoking. There are certain ways long-time smokers hold cigarettes, use lighters, etc. Fraser had this down pat, and he has Eisenhower smoking in almost every scene, which would have been accurate. Makes me wonder if Fraser is a smoker in real life.

Next up, uniforms. Jezus H. Christ, could these people not hire a competent costuming team that understood WWII uniforms and how they were worn? The errors were everywhere, and to an old soldier like me who spend over two decades in uniform, they were galling. Soldiers don't go around with loose neckties. They don't go to formal briefings or meetings wearing only partial uniforms and rolled up sleeves. They don't wander around with their uniform shirts unbuttoned almost to the waist. And female soldiers don't wear earrings, particularly pendant earrings (which the Kay Summersby character is always seen with). The individual uniform items may have been correct - the shoes were the right color, the patches were sewn on correctly, etc.- but how the actors wore them was awful, and would have resulted in lots of ass-chewings in the real world. 

So we have a bad script, bad direction, and a bad historical portrayal. Why, I mean, WHY?! It could have been so easy to put together a crisp and fascinating story based on the well-understood challenges. There were challenges in the science and art of weather forecasting, challenges in balancing weather against operational requirements, challenges in making sure the Germans were denied the ability to develop their own accurate weather picture. Nobody has tried to put this on film before, so it's not like the writers and director needed to find their own 'spin' to separate this movie from all the other D-Day weather flicks. 

It really comes down to nothing more than poor story development, poor writing, and poor directing. I don't think Pressure will age well in comparison to all the excellent WWII films and series that have been released in the last 30 years. It all started with Saving Private Ryan, which established a new war movie production paradigm that demands good story and production accuracy. These movies portray real people that changed history. To do a sloppy job on even the small stories is an insult to their memory.

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