Through most of its ad campaign, Andrew Garfield‘s new film The Uprising has resembled — if not a standard-issue period epic — at least something relatively familiar. We’ve got grit, muck, and shaky camera movements to dramatize a (new-to-cinema) historical incident: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, also known as the Wat Tyler Rebellion.

However, the aforementioned advertising campaign took a seemingly unexpected pivot a few weeks ago when a few spots referred to the film as The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. This was confusing on several levels. For one thing, it makes the movie sound like a bookend to a very recent film called The Death of Robin Hood, to which it is wholly unrelated. (Even more puzzling, said movie was not a hit and therefore not a movie any marketer would want to bring to mind.) For another, the Peasants’ Revolt is a real historical event, while Robin Hood is a legendary figure with some loose possible basis in reality whose fictional exploits are typically set around 180 years before this story’s period. Finally, the film’s U.K. ad campaign quickly distanced itself from the U.S. version, stating that this was not a Robin Hood movie. The U.S. ads quickly dropped the fake subtitle.

So what’s going on with The Uprising? Is this a Robin Hood movie or not?

Is The Uprising Secretly a Robin Hood Movie?

The most appropriate answer is probably “yes, it’s not.” Or possibly “no, it kind of is.” Let me explain. But to do that, the movie itself requires some background. Namely about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1318…

What Is The Uprising About? All About the Peasants’ Revolt of 1318 (And How It Does and Doesn’t Tie Into the New Andrew Garfield Movie):

Though the Peasants’ Revolt is sometimes referred to as the Wat Tyler Rebellion, Andrew Garfield, the star of this movie, is not actually playing Wat Tyler. He’s playing an unnamed English ploughman (hmmm!) who has lost his family in the Black Death pandemic of earlier in the fourteenth century. A teenage King Richard II (Woody Norman) is goaded into raising taxes on the peasant class, because the church and merchant classes won’t stand for it. As it turns out, Garfield’s ploughman won’t either, at least not when tax collectors attempt to take a second death tax because of his lack of handy paperwork about his family’s demise. He snaps and attacks the tax collector. Soon priest John Ball (Jamie Bell) and Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) have jumped at the chance to lead this growing rebellion. (Note: John Ball and Wat Tyler were real people.)

Much of the movie follows these three characters attempting to negotiate with King Richard, who presents as sympathetic to their complaints, but is held back by his council of advisors. Violence flares up, depicted in the customary Paul Greengrass style: immediate, believable, a little monotonous in its chaos. Garfield, Bell, and Jarvis all give compelling performances. Garfield is particularly effective as a man who may lack the calculation of a born leader, but becomes one through sheer righteous fury. He has a way of playing anger while holding on to his deeply wrought emotional wounds; you never forget what drove him over the edge.

You might, however, forget that he’s not a particular historical figure. To get further into how this movie does or does not connect to Robin Hood requires spoiling the movie’s final sequence. Though it’s relatively disconnected from the rest of the film — the broad outlines of which have long since been spoiled by history books — you should still consider yourself warned.

**Spoilers for The Uprising, now in theaters**

By the final stretch of the film, the initial rebellion has been quelled, and the ploughman has escaped, along with a smattering of rebels who have avoided execution, into… the forest. The movie jumps forward a year, when the king and his mother (Katherine Waterston) are traveling through said forest in a carriage, when they are waylaid by a group of robbers. One of them is the ploughman, dressed in a greenish outfit and face-covering bandana. Why, he looks a bit like… well, the DC superhero Green Arrow, actually! But a green-outfitted outlaw leading a group of semi-merry men to rob the unjustly rich in the forest is obviously supposed to evoke the legend of Robin Hood, though the name is not spoken in the film. The Peasants’ Revolt has been retrofitted as a Robin Hood origin story, and this doesn’t seem to be a last-minute revision to give a grim story a happy ending. The project was first announced as a Benedict Cumberbatch vehicle called The Hood. Given that title, it might well have once included more Robin Hood stuff.

The strange thing about this is the same thing that plagues some other relatively recent Robin Hood retellings, specifically the high-profile Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe version from 2010: Positioning a movie as the origin of Robin Hood feels redundant, because virtually every modern Robin Hood retelling is an origin story by its nature. The Adventures of Robin Hood, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the goofy 2018 version with Taron Egerton and Jamie Foxx (it’s fun!)… they all explain how Robin Hood came to be. Movies like Robin and Marian and The Death of Robin Hood catch up with the outlaw at the end of his life. Very few take place in the adventure-having middle, though the Disney cartoon from 1973 is a notable exception.

In a way, then, it’s precisely the strange quagmire of real history and origin-story nonsense that legitimizes The Uprising as a true Robin Hood movie, or at least a true 21st century retelling. A grimmer, grittier version? That is redundantly focused on events that turned a man into an outlaw, even though past versions almost always explain that bit? And plays fast and loose with historical accuracy? Honestly, the movie hardly needs the green outfit or the band of outlaws. This somewhat entertaining, intermittently tedious, vaguely misguided project is Robin Hood all over.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.