‘The American Revolution’

Ken Burns’ deep dive through America’s war for independence has everything you’d expect from a Ken Burns doc: narration by Peter Coyote, slow zooms into images (in this case, paintings instead of sepia-colored pictures), a thoroughness that borders on fanatical, a running time only slightly shorter than a college semester. Burns gonna Burns! Yet this meticulous examination of how our country went through the turbulent growing pains of going from a colony of Great Britain to a sovereign power punctures the myth of grand, united-we-stand origin story at every turn, and brings in not just the celebrity-voiced perspectives of the founding fathers but those of displaced Indigenous populations, enslaved people, and loyalists who found themselves persecuted in the name of a patriotic cause. It’s as much a re-education about the birth of our nation as it is an extension of the education handed down to most generations, in regards to those truths we’ve long held to be self-evident. And while Burns has gone out of his way to say this decade-in-the-making project isn’t a critique of the present, his scholarly, multi-episode history comes at a crucial moment regarding the fight for the future of these not-quite-so-united states.