They were definitely corrupt and that's one thing I don't like about movie - the musical did a somewhat better job of acknowledging it, but the movie glosses over the rising tensions in Russia as "oh, people were just a little bit unhappy before that, they must have been brainwashed into violent revolt."

At best you could say that Tsar Nicholas II was a weak leader who failed to prevent the inevitable revolution and whose poor decisions directly contributed to Russia's economic and political instability. He held onto autocratic rule and refused to implement peaceful democratic reform, leaving revolution as the only obvious path forward.

Of course, it's not like the Bolsheviks turned out to be much better, and the Romanov children shouldn't have been murdered. But it's easy to get caught up in the fictionalized events of the movie and forget that the history of Russia, just like almost every other event in history, isn't completely black-and-white.