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The release of Young Washington can’t help but recall film-industry exploitation, from Young Tom Edison (1939) to Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) to Young Indiana Jones (1992), all diminutions of complex ideals.

De-aging the father of our country according to the rationale of digital superhero movies reveals a pandering desperation that is new to the nation’s self-image — history that is disrespected by liberals and apparently no longer taught in schools. Angel Studios, the faith- and values-based production-distribution company, must therefore present a biographical history lesson as part of its proselytizing mission in a godless, America-last culture.

It’s amusing to read the coded bias in reviews of Young Washington: Put-downs describing its “commitment to old-fashioned stodginess”; laments about its “declamatory style”; complaints that it “revels in its patriotism.” Most reviews were half-hearted at best, unable to hide smug satisfaction that the film did not stir enthusiasm — betraying mainstream reviewers’ casual indifference to America’s founding history.

The origin story about the early life of George Washington (William Franklyn-Miller), a young land surveyor in Virginia where he is a militia officer, builds on his role in the French and Indian War, which preceded his command during the Revolutionary War, foretelling his rise as the first U.S. president. What ought to be familiar to every citizen — instilled from the cherry-tree legend about Washington’s innate honor (“I cannot tell a lie”) — is conveyed with a predictable plainness in the bland script credited to director Jon Erwin, co-written with Tom Provost and Diederik Hoogstraten.

Erwin’s earnestness respects historical accuracy in the performances and especially in the battle scenes, which recall Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (a Mel Gibson vehicle presaging Gibson’s own directorial preference for cathartic violence over fidelity to history’s political and moral issues). But Erwin’s rather conventional narrative doesn’t reveal a vision of the past like that in Terrence Malick’s The New World so much as react to the current national disillusionment.

Erwin’s optimistic Washington saga opposes the pessimism of such recent political oration heard in “Our democracy is not perfect” rhetoric. Face-to-face arguments between the young militiaman hero and veteran figures (Ben Kinglsey’s Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddle, Kelsey Grammer’s Lord Fairfax) convey intergenerational class divisions, but they are not articulate enough to challenge present-day anti-nationalist rhetoric, derived from Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech in 2008 — resistance toward American history and the Constitution’s aspirational language.

Erwin and Franklyn-Miller’s upright figure of George Washington falls short of the impassioned, personal argument in Michael Apted’s anti-slavery drama Amazing Grace (2006), about the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, and the comic book thrill of Timur Bekmambetov’s mixed-genre action-history pastiche Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).

Some mythic aspect is needed to ignite Millennial excitement such as the nascent social and spiritual yearning behind the 2000 indie film George Washington by the 25-year-old North Carolina School of the Arts student David Gordon Green. Green chose an exotic title and specific subject that reflected the impact of American history on the lives of modern teens — a black schoolboy and his multiracial friends in the rural South.

Green’s kid, named George Richardson (Donald Holden), lives a tradition that reflects the black Southern custom of giving historical names to individuals, in line with the impact of American presidents — an authentic eccentricity proved by a photograph of George H. W. Bush displayed in a working-class home.

Green’s college thesis film was also his Hollywood calling card. It launched his career in sophomoric commercial fare, but it was a promising debut that galvanized disparate cultural sources — from Southern gospel to hip-hop multiculturalism to Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, Charles Burnett’s neorealist Killer of Sheep, and Terrence Malick’s comeback film The Thin Red Line.

Although not literally about President George Washington, Green sensed Washington’s legacy in a child’s prayer to “heal a broken land.” That’s natural, unstifled patriotic imagination. The difference between Green’s film and Erwin’s is summed up by what contemporary politics lack: inspiration. Young Washington seeks an audience of naïve, untutored citizens, while George Washington evoked America’s past and future in the present.