The Four Feathers

This new adaptation of A.E.W. Mason's 1902 adventure novel isn't as good as the 1939 version but has its revisionist virtues. Many of the late Victorian era's prejudices — colonialism good, dark-skinned people not-so-good — were second nature to Mason, and Shekhar Kapur (in conjunction with co-scripters Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini) takes those implicit attitudes and moves them front and center, where they belong. The question is whether a contemporary audience will find the heroes' occasionally blatant racism fundamentally off-putting or merely historically accurate. England, 1875. Harry Feversham (Heath Ledger) has a promising future as a British Ar...