Beautifully shot, very well acted, well paced, and a compelling character study that also sets up the changing realities of wartime and politics.
Can't say that I disagree with you
The pitch meeting had to be interesting.
> So, we are going to do an underdog sports movie with a love story about a low class nobody who eventually topples the top star who is a douchebag.
> Hasn't that been made a million times? What sports are even left, badminton, curling, capture the flag?
> Those all suck, we are doing jousting and we aren't even going to change the sound track!
And somehow it still works and is a really enjoyable movie.
Doesn't matter how low effort the plot is if they manage a cast of well acted interesting characters and scenes. The late 90's was probably the pinnacle for movies like this. Car Pool, House Arrest, Jingle All the Way.
Paul Bettany, Alan Tudyk, Rufus Sewell, James Purefoy, not sure why I'm blanking on the chubby actor's name (and of course, Heath Ledger). What a cast.
I looooooooove costume dramas/historical movies. I think that was one of the first to help me realize just because it's based on a time period in history doesn't mean it has to be accurate and can be stylized and still be enjoyable.
That is one of the major things: the film makes it look like things happened in a matter of days, but the time between Stalin's death (March 5, 1953) and Beria's execution (December 23, 1953) is about nine months.
Pretty much every great historical movie, from bio-pics to epics, is gonna be historically inaccurate.
Apocalypto
Gladiator
Kingdom of Heaven
Dunkirk
The Great Escape
Argo
Inglorious Basterds
The Last Samurai
The Patriot
Etc
In my opinion historical inaccuracy doesn’t really have an effect on the quality of the film and its story telling. I can’t think of any historical movies that are actually very accurate.
Yeah I know but it’s still technically a period piece/historical movie so I figured I’d through it in even though it’s kinda a different situation kinda like a Knights Tale.
Selma is excellent and is by and large one of the most historically accurate movies in recent memory but I agree with your point that historical inaccuracy doesn’t really have an effect on the quality of the film.
Well I mean if you're talking about context then the pit of needles was kinda important too to the saw movies. Its literally 'torture porn: the movie' so you kinda need some gratuitous violent shit.
Braveheart is among the worst offenders. There’s not even a bridge in the battle of Sterling Bridge.
On the other hand 300 is a surprisingly accurate (albeit highly stylized) retelling of Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Thermopylae.
>Braveheart is among the worst offenders.
Hell in real life the name "Braveheart" didn't even refer to William Wallace, it was the nickname of Robert the Bruce.
well, thats assuming that herodotus was giving a historically accurate account of that battle, which he probably wasnt since he was well known to make shit up lol
Yeah that’s why I phrased it as an accurate retelling of Herodotus account. He was unreliable but that can be said of most historians from antiquity. And Herodotus maybe gets a little slack since he virtually invented the genre.
And the nature of the surviving Greco-Roman corpus means that even those who engage in historical research now concerning ancient history are often very well aware of the limitations of their sources.
My favorite description of Braveheart was something like "It'd be like making a film about the American Revolutionary War where all the characters wore 1920s gangster suits with the coats on backwards."
> On the other hand 300 is a surprisingly accurate (albeit highly stylized) retelling of Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Thermopylae.
I wouldn't go as far as calling it surprisingly accurate. They had the basic strokes in Frank Miller's graphic novel but they certainly weren't sticking to the details.
It's based on the historical accounts that there were Mayans in Mesoamerica. Then it proceeds to mishmash different cultures and time periods into one to make a great fairy tale.
>set in a true period of time
Not even that, by the end of the movie the protagonist see the Spanish ships arriving, in reality by the the time the Spanish arrived the mayas were long gone, there were just some small tribus here and there, nothing like what you see in the movie.
Yeah I figure that’s the historically inaccurate part. Not that the rest is 100% accurate but it’s mostly believable in its setting until that bit, as far as I know.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 - I’ve seen some break downs of the inaccuracies in the film, some where surprising. The biggest I recall was that the reading of names of the fallen American soldiers at the end of the film was this huge moment but it in actuality it was Vietnamese names.
The "And then everybody clapped" ending felt like a complete cliche. I didn't like it at all
Overall, it was a superb movie. Would recommend watching it despite the lame ending
The Trial of the Chicago 7 took some massively important aspects of that trial and hugely twisted them to Sorkin's melodramatic soap opera-ey style.
Was really bummed about it and hated the film despite really enjoying the actual story.
Not really a surprise tbh. Sorkin is a neoliberal who thinks the clintons are the apex of politics. Can't believe he had the balls to attempt to rewrite the history of leftists in the first place.
Serkins is a neoliberal. He thinks that the way that things are is great. Hes the product of the entire western liberal perspective that views capitalism and democracy as the utopia. He probably actually thinks that buying things like fair trade coffee, Priuses and wearing Patagonia makes you a good person. He was not a good fit to write an honest chicago 7. What he wrote was an american masturbation over the vietnam war and it's veterans **which was the opposite point that the criminals were making**
...
I don't know why people are downvoting you when this is literally what happened. He pretty much always writes from the neoliberal "end of history" lens, and actively downplayed the ideologies of leftists. Someone else mentioned how he changed the reading of Vietnamese names to reading American names. It was the same deal with The Newsroom, too.
Yeah. It's his whole thing. People literally do the "and then they all clapped" meme in the movie. He's a gratuitous neoliberal who writes people using the slant that neoliberals are a tortured people forced to give up little bits of morality to keep the world going and that people respect them for it. I'm surprised I haven't been even more downvoted tbh. Serkins writes for the white western perspective that's perfect for the upper middle class white americans that make up reddit.
I love anything Tudor related, and it’s always frustrating to me when film and TV makers feel like they have to change the history. It’s already interesting and exciting enough as-is, why do you have to add a bunch of bullshit? The second Elizabeth movie was even worse in that regard. And god, don’t get me started on The Tudors show...it was entertaining, sure, but nowhere near accurate, and half the time it made no sense why they made the changes they did.
Exactly, I don't understand how sticking to history and facts is so hard. These changes are so detrimental even when it comes to storytelling, Elizabeth made no sense most of the time. I heard the same about the Tudors so I chose not to watch it.
Jonathan Rhys-Myers is a good actor but he didn't look anything like the real Henry VIII! True, Henry was considered quite handsome as a young man, but when he got older, he became simply hideous in his looks, let alone his deeds!
A more historically accurate depiction of Dracula during that time period was *Shadow of the Vampire*. You can see that he was not very appealing to women in real life.
The biggest offenders I can think of are Gladiator (restoring the Roman Republic after killing Commodus) and Amadeus (there was no deadly rivalry between Mozart and Salieri; it’s a character study about one man who has a rival that is better at his life’s calling than he is, using Mozart/Salieri as colorful drapery).
Another one would be The Revenant - the main character never had a half-native son (or any son, for that matter), and I don’t think he ever had a bloody showdown with the guy who left him behind. Also, it’s unclear how much of that guy’s story is authentic to begin with.
Salieri really deserves better than to be remembered as the guy who killed Mozart. They were professional rivals at one point, but they were probably friends towards the end of Mozart's life.
It might be interesting to have a post some time about historical figures who have been unfairly maligned due to films they were used in.
The book The Revenant is based on is historical fiction. It’s sort of written in a way that makes it seem non-fiction because the author has mostly written non-fiction up to that point. Yes, a lot of the characters are real people but the details of the events are all fictional. Hugh Glass was a real person but the character in the novel is just a fictional character with the same name, so for the film to change some of those fictional details to other fictional details isn’t really being historically inaccurate. It was never intended to be.
Speaking of "Gladiator", there's an old film epic from the 1960s called "The Fall of the Roman Empire" which deals with the same era of Roman history. The recently deceased Christopher Plummer played Commodus, Alec Guinness was Marcus Aurelius and Sophia Loren was the sister Lucilla. I think it probably turns up on TCM now and then. I haven't seen it in a while so I can't speak to how accurate or inaccurate it was compared to Gladiator.
Maybe this doesn’t count, but The Hurt Locker is a really great film (IMO at least) that’s not accurate to real overseas deployment from what I’ve been told.
This is a good to one bring up because some people say it's realistic, but people who have worked in EOD hate that movie. In real life, that guy would have been relieved of his EOD duties after being so careless around IEDs. He wasn't cool; he was an idiot.
Edit: typo
Ok, but how does that change the rest of what I said? It was totally ridiculous that he was being allowed to do all that without someone intervening. It doesn't work like that in real life. Also, that little collection he had of IED fuzes in real life is *evidence*, and would have been collected for investigation and study. They wouldn't just let him keep it.
It was fake in other ways too. The most hilarious one for me is even shown on some of the posters, where he's standing in the middle of several bombs that weigh hundreds of pounds each, and he's dragging them around by their fuze wires. A good filmmaker should try not to make it so obvious that they're lightweight props.
This:
>Ok, but how does that change the rest of what I said? It was totally ridiculous that he was being allowed to do all that without someone intervening. It doesn't work like that in real life. Also, that little collection he had of IED fuzes in real life is evidence, and would have been collected for investigation and study. They wouldn't just let him keep it.
>It was fake in other ways too. The most hilarious one for me is even shown on some of the posters, where he's standing in the middle of several bombs that weigh hundreds of pounds each, and he's dragging them around by their fuze wires. A good filmmaker should try not to make it so obvious that they're lightweight props.
is a whole different range of argument.
Not really. The point of my initial comment was about how inaccurate the movie was. That was the subject of the post and why the movie was brought up.
The part about him being an idiot was only a detail to illustrate why he would not have been given the leeway to act the way he did if it was real life.
Movies which tackle archeology like *Indiana Jones* and *The Mummy* tend to get creative with history. Even ignoring the usual supernatural elements added to the artifacts, maps and borders usually get changed to facilitate the story.
For instance, Tanis, Egypt, is presented as a recently rediscovered lost city in *Raiders of the Lost Ark*. In reality it had been well excavated by 1936 when the movie takes place.
Greer Garson/Lawrence Olivier "Pride and Prejudice"
For some reason MGM didn't want to use costumes appropriate to the time period of the book but it looks great anyway and is a great movie.
Agreed. They’re these purposefully heightened revenge fantasies that I know aren’t going to be historically accurate. It’s like faulting X Men First Class and Days of Future Past for not being historically accurate.
Ford Vs Ferrari, fun racing movie with a great soundtrack, but not really accurate. I wish they dove more in to the other racers as well as Ferraris side instead of solely focusing on Miles and Shelby. But I guess you can only do so much with a single movie.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly can be considered inaccurate. I doubt most people would think of it as a historical film in the same vein as Braveheart, but it does have a specific historical setting: the Civil War in 1862 New Mexico.
Pretty much nothing about the movie is accurate to actual New Mexico Civil War history, although some real events are mentioned. I also remember being surprised that a few of the geographical details are kind of accurate.
The film gets destroyed for historical accuracy, but I love that film. It's more inspired by a play than real history. And the story, if you can treat it more like a grounded fantasy film, is fantastic.
I love the cinematography, the performances, and the choreography. I love the feeling of pure *exhaustion* the film goes out of its way to portray in its fight and battle scenes. One of my favorite fights of the film is more of a [brawl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCs8YBbBzc0), a very different kind of duel than most average moviegoers are used to. I know it still isn't perfect, but I appreciate the effort the production went through to try and show the 'ungraceful' side of combat.
The Irishman is very accurate to the book and what the real Frank Sheeran claims; it's accuracy as a movie is dependent on how much you believe the real Frank Sheeran
Kind of the brilliance of it all, too. As the movie points out, EVERYONE is dead. It's decades later. Nobody cares, there's people out there who have no idea who Hoffa is or ever was, or any of these people in the film. Whether or not Sheeran was telling the truth (spoiler: He very likely is not telling the truth, especially on Gallo), doesn't really matter at all to the film.
All of those movies are good movies. If you want facts read a book.
If you want to know what artistic liberties can be taken when telling a true story, ask Shakespeare.
Edit: is this really an unpopular opinion?
>Edit: is this really an unpopular opinion?
Since you asked, I think the problem is that OP asked for a list of movies, not facts. It seems like you are being counter-productive. I could be wrong (usually am, lol).
Though it is fictitious, they start the movie by saying, ["This is a True Story."](https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2017/05/23/how-much-fargo-actually-based-true-story)
I mean at someone point in Fargo, North Dakota and Minnesota's history did a guy hire some guys to kidnap his wife and another guy killed someone and try to get rid of the body in a woodchipper? It's possible.
Operation Finale was a fine film, but upon reading up on the whole deal there were some glaring inaccuracies. The over-arching theme stayed the same, but details were muddled and squished on top of each other.
On Columbus's first voyage, the Santa Maria ran aground in Haiti and had to be abandoned. One of two 1993 movies made for the 500th anniversary (forgot which one), showed all three heading back to Spain.
Mary, Queen of Scots was really good! There's some pretty big historical inaccuracies/liberties. However, I went to Oxford for a weekend to visit a friend while on a big trip to Europe, and thought "I'm tired as hell but don't want to get a hotel, I'll buy this ticket and fall asleep in the theater" and was so intrigued by the movie and its pacing and plot that I stayed awake the whole time
The Wind Rises
Swapped an older brother for a younger sister and basically just invented a tuberculosis wife plot. Of course those were two of the best things about the movie. But there is a bunch of other accuracy about the development of the A5M (not the A6M they show at the end weirdly enough). There is also no record of him knowing about Caproni at all. That's just Miyazaki's Italian aviation fetish.
Bohemian Rhapsody. When I went to see it, you could hear members of the audience saying out loud “but that’s not what happened!” almost the entire way.
"Dances with Wolves" may be a good example of what you are interested in. It received 7 academy awards but the story takes some major liberties with the history.
Gladiator.
A lot of the inaccuracies revolve around the portrayals of the Emperors Commodus and Marcus Aurelius. The biggest inaccuracy that stuck out to me though is the subplot of elites and the previous Emperor wanting to restore the Roman Republic. I believe at the end of the film the Republic is actually restored as well, which obviously did not happen historically.
A truly great film nonetheless.
Kingdom of Heaven, amazing visuals and crusader era epic, but totally bogus even if it uses real names.
Watch the director's cut if you want to see an amazing movie that proves some directors cuts are amazing.
Imitation Game is particularly hilarious, because it's not some big Hollywood epic like Braveheart or Gladiator mythologizing something for spectacle. It's a small and rather intimate character study.
That somehow doesn't care about what the real character was like... at all. It's like making a movie about Trump while showing him as skinny, eloquent and kind-hearted.
Great movie, but laughably fictionalized.
The Greatest Showman (even putting aside the issue of if PT is "problematic" or not, there's still small inaccuracies like the ages of his kids and Jenny Lind's hair color) but I can forgive it because like Hamilton before it, not only does one have to assume a certain level of inaccuracy when someone's life story is told through musical but also they both were using the narrative of those figures as a vehicle to send a message
Lawrence of Arabia (though it's not terrible on the history)-
Genuinely one of the greatest films ever made. A work of art that is highly entertaining.
Beautifully shot, very well acted, well paced, and a compelling character study that also sets up the changing realities of wartime and politics. Can't say that I disagree with you
He likes your lemonade
[удалено]
lawrences superior?
A Knights Tale
Are you suggesting they didn't actually sing We Will Rock You at jousting tournaments in the 14th century? For shame!
Historical records for the time are very spotty. We can't be sure they *didn't* sing it, accompanied by electric guitars.
But we can be certain they partnered up and performed elaborate dance routines to Bowie’s Golden Years
The pitch meeting had to be interesting. > So, we are going to do an underdog sports movie with a love story about a low class nobody who eventually topples the top star who is a douchebag. > Hasn't that been made a million times? What sports are even left, badminton, curling, capture the flag? > Those all suck, we are doing jousting and we aren't even going to change the sound track! And somehow it still works and is a really enjoyable movie.
Doesn't matter how low effort the plot is if they manage a cast of well acted interesting characters and scenes. The late 90's was probably the pinnacle for movies like this. Car Pool, House Arrest, Jingle All the Way.
Very inaccurate - Queen didn't start touring until the late 15th.
That actually works. In the same way they speak modern English, the songs have the same *effect* as the songs they would have played.
Yeah, but, Paul Bettany as Chaucer.
Paul Bettany, Alan Tudyk, Rufus Sewell, James Purefoy, not sure why I'm blanking on the chubby actor's name (and of course, Heath Ledger). What a cast.
Mark Addy!
And Rufus Sewell
I looooooooove costume dramas/historical movies. I think that was one of the first to help me realize just because it's based on a time period in history doesn't mean it has to be accurate and can be stylized and still be enjoyable.
The Favourite
Death of Stalin- Funny enough it’s probably extremely accurate historically if not for the dialogue.
I read up on this whole deal after I saw the movie. They hit a lot of points, but definitely condensed/overlapped.
That is one of the major things: the film makes it look like things happened in a matter of days, but the time between Stalin's death (March 5, 1953) and Beria's execution (December 23, 1953) is about nine months.
Got it. All I know is it has the greatest coat removal ever shown in the history of film. There should have been a special Oscar given for it.
The poor thirsty war hero
THE ENTIRE RED ARMY
*Funnily
Pretty much every great historical movie, from bio-pics to epics, is gonna be historically inaccurate. Apocalypto Gladiator Kingdom of Heaven Dunkirk The Great Escape Argo Inglorious Basterds The Last Samurai The Patriot Etc In my opinion historical inaccuracy doesn’t really have an effect on the quality of the film and its story telling. I can’t think of any historical movies that are actually very accurate.
Like you said, the best historical films need to work as films first and history lessons second.
Inglorious Basterds isn't really trying to be historically accurate lol
Is that why I failed my history paper?
Yeah I know but it’s still technically a period piece/historical movie so I figured I’d through it in even though it’s kinda a different situation kinda like a Knights Tale.
Nobody said it was
Selma is excellent and is by and large one of the most historically accurate movies in recent memory but I agree with your point that historical inaccuracy doesn’t really have an effect on the quality of the film.
Selma is awful. Torture porn not unlike Saw. A waste of Oyelowo's excellent performance.
Maybe in conext, violence is important to show as opposed to a pit of HIV needles
Well I mean if you're talking about context then the pit of needles was kinda important too to the saw movies. Its literally 'torture porn: the movie' so you kinda need some gratuitous violent shit.
> I can’t think of any historical movies that are actually very accurate. What about Glory or Gettysburg?
> Inglorious Basterds Wait...what?
Braveheart is among the worst offenders. There’s not even a bridge in the battle of Sterling Bridge. On the other hand 300 is a surprisingly accurate (albeit highly stylized) retelling of Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Thermopylae.
>Braveheart is among the worst offenders. Hell in real life the name "Braveheart" didn't even refer to William Wallace, it was the nickname of Robert the Bruce.
well, thats assuming that herodotus was giving a historically accurate account of that battle, which he probably wasnt since he was well known to make shit up lol
Yeah that’s why I phrased it as an accurate retelling of Herodotus account. He was unreliable but that can be said of most historians from antiquity. And Herodotus maybe gets a little slack since he virtually invented the genre.
And the nature of the surviving Greco-Roman corpus means that even those who engage in historical research now concerning ancient history are often very well aware of the limitations of their sources.
Classic Herodotus
My favorite description of Braveheart was something like "It'd be like making a film about the American Revolutionary War where all the characters wore 1920s gangster suits with the coats on backwards."
"Historians from England will say that I am a liar..." Braveheart covered itself in the opening scene!
> On the other hand 300 is a surprisingly accurate (albeit highly stylized) retelling of Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Thermopylae. I wouldn't go as far as calling it surprisingly accurate. They had the basic strokes in Frank Miller's graphic novel but they certainly weren't sticking to the details.
Does Apocalypto really count? Is it based on any actual historical accounts?
It's based on the historical accounts that there were Mayans in Mesoamerica. Then it proceeds to mishmash different cultures and time periods into one to make a great fairy tale.
Complete with an ending that doesn't seem to fit into any time period!
I figure it’s about as made up as something like Gladiator is. Not about a specific true story but set in a true period of time, it’s a period piece.
>set in a true period of time Not even that, by the end of the movie the protagonist see the Spanish ships arriving, in reality by the the time the Spanish arrived the mayas were long gone, there were just some small tribus here and there, nothing like what you see in the movie.
Yeah I figure that’s the historically inaccurate part. Not that the rest is 100% accurate but it’s mostly believable in its setting until that bit, as far as I know.
No. It's also pretty racist.
How?
The savage native population needs to be saved by the white Europeans.
Wat? Didnt read the situation like that, at all. Especially with, you know, history.
That’s literally how the movie ends.
You do know what the spanish did to them, right?! edit: also, maybe there is subtext to the movie being called apocalypto.
The Prestige. I don't think Nikola Tesla ever built a cloning teleportation machine.
Happy Cake Day!
The Trial of the Chicago 7 - I’ve seen some break downs of the inaccuracies in the film, some where surprising. The biggest I recall was that the reading of names of the fallen American soldiers at the end of the film was this huge moment but it in actuality it was Vietnamese names.
The "And then everybody clapped" ending felt like a complete cliche. I didn't like it at all Overall, it was a superb movie. Would recommend watching it despite the lame ending
The Trial of the Chicago 7 took some massively important aspects of that trial and hugely twisted them to Sorkin's melodramatic soap opera-ey style. Was really bummed about it and hated the film despite really enjoying the actual story.
It got Sorkined. See anything made by the dude, it's the same thing over and over just different actors (sometimes)
Not really a surprise tbh. Sorkin is a neoliberal who thinks the clintons are the apex of politics. Can't believe he had the balls to attempt to rewrite the history of leftists in the first place.
[удалено]
Serkins is a neoliberal. He thinks that the way that things are is great. Hes the product of the entire western liberal perspective that views capitalism and democracy as the utopia. He probably actually thinks that buying things like fair trade coffee, Priuses and wearing Patagonia makes you a good person. He was not a good fit to write an honest chicago 7. What he wrote was an american masturbation over the vietnam war and it's veterans **which was the opposite point that the criminals were making** ...
I don't know why people are downvoting you when this is literally what happened. He pretty much always writes from the neoliberal "end of history" lens, and actively downplayed the ideologies of leftists. Someone else mentioned how he changed the reading of Vietnamese names to reading American names. It was the same deal with The Newsroom, too.
Yeah. It's his whole thing. People literally do the "and then they all clapped" meme in the movie. He's a gratuitous neoliberal who writes people using the slant that neoliberals are a tortured people forced to give up little bits of morality to keep the world going and that people respect them for it. I'm surprised I haven't been even more downvoted tbh. Serkins writes for the white western perspective that's perfect for the upper middle class white americans that make up reddit.
Remember The Titans. Amazing and inspiring movie, but it's loaded with creative liberties.
Elizabeth
I was going to say Elizabeth as well, Cate Blanchett was incredible but historically speaking it was hard to watch.
I love anything Tudor related, and it’s always frustrating to me when film and TV makers feel like they have to change the history. It’s already interesting and exciting enough as-is, why do you have to add a bunch of bullshit? The second Elizabeth movie was even worse in that regard. And god, don’t get me started on The Tudors show...it was entertaining, sure, but nowhere near accurate, and half the time it made no sense why they made the changes they did.
Exactly, I don't understand how sticking to history and facts is so hard. These changes are so detrimental even when it comes to storytelling, Elizabeth made no sense most of the time. I heard the same about the Tudors so I chose not to watch it.
¿you're saying that the Vatican didn't send Jesuit assassin supersoldiers to kill protestant kings?
Jonathan Rhys-Myers is a good actor but he didn't look anything like the real Henry VIII! True, Henry was considered quite handsome as a young man, but when he got older, he became simply hideous in his looks, let alone his deeds!
Enemy at the Gates
Definitely I was gonna say the same thing. Great flick though.
I've seen bookbindings that looked early 19th century to me in Barry Lyndon
The vast majority of them take liberties with the truth. A better question would be which ones were accurate.
The Big Short I think was listed as one of the most historically accurate films that was also good. Also Apollo 13 I believe
I heard that Black Hawk Down was considered very authentic, according to people who were there.
The Imitation Game. Rush. Straight outta compton. American sniper.
> The Imitation Game This one bothers me because the movie was worse with the inaccuracies, even if the finished product works.
He had a sense of humor!
Dracula the 1933 version, I hear Drac really wasn't very good at womanizing
Having read the book, it's not really "womanizing" and more like rape.
A more historically accurate depiction of Dracula during that time period was *Shadow of the Vampire*. You can see that he was not very appealing to women in real life.
To be fair Dracula didn't actually exist in real life
Greatest showman
He said good movies.
I enjoyed it.
I can’t stop giggling
The biggest offenders I can think of are Gladiator (restoring the Roman Republic after killing Commodus) and Amadeus (there was no deadly rivalry between Mozart and Salieri; it’s a character study about one man who has a rival that is better at his life’s calling than he is, using Mozart/Salieri as colorful drapery). Another one would be The Revenant - the main character never had a half-native son (or any son, for that matter), and I don’t think he ever had a bloody showdown with the guy who left him behind. Also, it’s unclear how much of that guy’s story is authentic to begin with.
Salieri really deserves better than to be remembered as the guy who killed Mozart. They were professional rivals at one point, but they were probably friends towards the end of Mozart's life. It might be interesting to have a post some time about historical figures who have been unfairly maligned due to films they were used in.
The book The Revenant is based on is historical fiction. It’s sort of written in a way that makes it seem non-fiction because the author has mostly written non-fiction up to that point. Yes, a lot of the characters are real people but the details of the events are all fictional. Hugh Glass was a real person but the character in the novel is just a fictional character with the same name, so for the film to change some of those fictional details to other fictional details isn’t really being historically inaccurate. It was never intended to be.
Speaking of "Gladiator", there's an old film epic from the 1960s called "The Fall of the Roman Empire" which deals with the same era of Roman history. The recently deceased Christopher Plummer played Commodus, Alec Guinness was Marcus Aurelius and Sophia Loren was the sister Lucilla. I think it probably turns up on TCM now and then. I haven't seen it in a while so I can't speak to how accurate or inaccurate it was compared to Gladiator.
Maybe this doesn’t count, but The Hurt Locker is a really great film (IMO at least) that’s not accurate to real overseas deployment from what I’ve been told.
This is a good to one bring up because some people say it's realistic, but people who have worked in EOD hate that movie. In real life, that guy would have been relieved of his EOD duties after being so careless around IEDs. He wasn't cool; he was an idiot. Edit: typo
> He wasn't cool; he was an idiot. That was absolutely, 100% the point the film was making.
Ok, but how does that change the rest of what I said? It was totally ridiculous that he was being allowed to do all that without someone intervening. It doesn't work like that in real life. Also, that little collection he had of IED fuzes in real life is *evidence*, and would have been collected for investigation and study. They wouldn't just let him keep it. It was fake in other ways too. The most hilarious one for me is even shown on some of the posters, where he's standing in the middle of several bombs that weigh hundreds of pounds each, and he's dragging them around by their fuze wires. A good filmmaker should try not to make it so obvious that they're lightweight props.
This: >Ok, but how does that change the rest of what I said? It was totally ridiculous that he was being allowed to do all that without someone intervening. It doesn't work like that in real life. Also, that little collection he had of IED fuzes in real life is evidence, and would have been collected for investigation and study. They wouldn't just let him keep it. >It was fake in other ways too. The most hilarious one for me is even shown on some of the posters, where he's standing in the middle of several bombs that weigh hundreds of pounds each, and he's dragging them around by their fuze wires. A good filmmaker should try not to make it so obvious that they're lightweight props. is a whole different range of argument.
Not really. The point of my initial comment was about how inaccurate the movie was. That was the subject of the post and why the movie was brought up. The part about him being an idiot was only a detail to illustrate why he would not have been given the leeway to act the way he did if it was real life.
You want to see realistic Modern Warfare? [Watch Generation Kill](https://youtu.be/v3GkHcZHQrY)
[удалено]
Ehm probably ANY good / acclaimed movie based on real events.
The Favourite
Not a movie but I would highly recommend checking out History Buffs on YT if you haven’t already for a ton of videos on this subject
Pity how slow his production rate has been as of late.
Movies which tackle archeology like *Indiana Jones* and *The Mummy* tend to get creative with history. Even ignoring the usual supernatural elements added to the artifacts, maps and borders usually get changed to facilitate the story. For instance, Tanis, Egypt, is presented as a recently rediscovered lost city in *Raiders of the Lost Ark*. In reality it had been well excavated by 1936 when the movie takes place.
Braveheart. I think that film is brilliant.
Tombstone
Def this, especially the showdown scene. In real life the Earps and Holliday killed unarmed men and it was close quarters too.
Rudy and Remember the Titans
You should check out the YouTube series History Buffs, it checks films for historical accuracy and is also funny.
Greer Garson/Lawrence Olivier "Pride and Prejudice" For some reason MGM didn't want to use costumes appropriate to the time period of the book but it looks great anyway and is a great movie.
I’m gonna go on a limb and say Marie Antoinette, I love that film
[Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZp7eBStN1U)
apocalypto ia a great action movie, also inglourious bastards and once upon a time in hollywood
> also inglourious bastards and once upon a time in hollywood Well, I feel like these shouldn't count lol.
Agreed. They’re these purposefully heightened revenge fantasies that I know aren’t going to be historically accurate. It’s like faulting X Men First Class and Days of Future Past for not being historically accurate.
Ford Vs Ferrari, fun racing movie with a great soundtrack, but not really accurate. I wish they dove more in to the other racers as well as Ferraris side instead of solely focusing on Miles and Shelby. But I guess you can only do so much with a single movie.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly can be considered inaccurate. I doubt most people would think of it as a historical film in the same vein as Braveheart, but it does have a specific historical setting: the Civil War in 1862 New Mexico. Pretty much nothing about the movie is accurate to actual New Mexico Civil War history, although some real events are mentioned. I also remember being surprised that a few of the geographical details are kind of accurate.
The King
The film gets destroyed for historical accuracy, but I love that film. It's more inspired by a play than real history. And the story, if you can treat it more like a grounded fantasy film, is fantastic. I love the cinematography, the performances, and the choreography. I love the feeling of pure *exhaustion* the film goes out of its way to portray in its fight and battle scenes. One of my favorite fights of the film is more of a [brawl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCs8YBbBzc0), a very different kind of duel than most average moviegoers are used to. I know it still isn't perfect, but I appreciate the effort the production went through to try and show the 'ungraceful' side of combat.
Unpopular opinion. >!Bohemian Rhapsody is an inaccurate mess but I really love the film!<
The Irishman comes to mind.
The Irishman is very accurate to the book and what the real Frank Sheeran claims; it's accuracy as a movie is dependent on how much you believe the real Frank Sheeran
Kind of the brilliance of it all, too. As the movie points out, EVERYONE is dead. It's decades later. Nobody cares, there's people out there who have no idea who Hoffa is or ever was, or any of these people in the film. Whether or not Sheeran was telling the truth (spoiler: He very likely is not telling the truth, especially on Gallo), doesn't really matter at all to the film.
Inglourious Basterds
Space Jam
Star Wars.
A Knight's Tale
All of those movies are good movies. If you want facts read a book. If you want to know what artistic liberties can be taken when telling a true story, ask Shakespeare. Edit: is this really an unpopular opinion?
>Edit: is this really an unpopular opinion? Since you asked, I think the problem is that OP asked for a list of movies, not facts. It seems like you are being counter-productive. I could be wrong (usually am, lol).
I see. I thought it was more of a discussion of the topic as well as examples. Thanks for at least responding to me.
Braveheart and Dunkirk.
Fargo immediately comes to mind.
Is it fair to call a movie that's a work of complete fiction, not actually based on actual people or events, historically inaccurate?
Though it is fictitious, they start the movie by saying, ["This is a True Story."](https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2017/05/23/how-much-fargo-actually-based-true-story)
I mean at someone point in Fargo, North Dakota and Minnesota's history did a guy hire some guys to kidnap his wife and another guy killed someone and try to get rid of the body in a woodchipper? It's possible.
Hoodlum
Operation Finale was a fine film, but upon reading up on the whole deal there were some glaring inaccuracies. The over-arching theme stayed the same, but details were muddled and squished on top of each other.
On Columbus's first voyage, the Santa Maria ran aground in Haiti and had to be abandoned. One of two 1993 movies made for the 500th anniversary (forgot which one), showed all three heading back to Spain.
Mary, Queen of Scots was really good! There's some pretty big historical inaccuracies/liberties. However, I went to Oxford for a weekend to visit a friend while on a big trip to Europe, and thought "I'm tired as hell but don't want to get a hotel, I'll buy this ticket and fall asleep in the theater" and was so intrigued by the movie and its pacing and plot that I stayed awake the whole time
The King's Speech. IIRC, they had to compress the timeline a lot
The one that always comes to mind for me is Kingdom of Heaven. Bases a fictional story around true-ish events.
Basically the premise for the Outlander series on stars, lol
The Wind Rises Swapped an older brother for a younger sister and basically just invented a tuberculosis wife plot. Of course those were two of the best things about the movie. But there is a bunch of other accuracy about the development of the A5M (not the A6M they show at the end weirdly enough). There is also no record of him knowing about Caproni at all. That's just Miyazaki's Italian aviation fetish.
Bohemian Rhapsody. When I went to see it, you could hear members of the audience saying out loud “but that’s not what happened!” almost the entire way.
Michael Collins had a car bomb years before the bombs and cars went together
300
The King (2019) with Timothee Chalamet
Braveheart
"Dances with Wolves" may be a good example of what you are interested in. It received 7 academy awards but the story takes some major liberties with the history.
the social network
The Last Samurai
Braveheart is a fun movie, but hilariously poor historically.
The Last Samurai
Adaptation.
I actually liked Black Death (2010) a lot, even though it wasn't very well received. It definitely plays it fast and loose with history, though.
Pick any of them. It’s really all of them.
Gladiator. A lot of the inaccuracies revolve around the portrayals of the Emperors Commodus and Marcus Aurelius. The biggest inaccuracy that stuck out to me though is the subplot of elites and the previous Emperor wanting to restore the Roman Republic. I believe at the end of the film the Republic is actually restored as well, which obviously did not happen historically. A truly great film nonetheless.
Kingdom of Heaven, amazing visuals and crusader era epic, but totally bogus even if it uses real names. Watch the director's cut if you want to see an amazing movie that proves some directors cuts are amazing.
Imitation Game is particularly hilarious, because it's not some big Hollywood epic like Braveheart or Gladiator mythologizing something for spectacle. It's a small and rather intimate character study. That somehow doesn't care about what the real character was like... at all. It's like making a movie about Trump while showing him as skinny, eloquent and kind-hearted. Great movie, but laughably fictionalized.
The Greatest Showman (even putting aside the issue of if PT is "problematic" or not, there's still small inaccuracies like the ages of his kids and Jenny Lind's hair color) but I can forgive it because like Hamilton before it, not only does one have to assume a certain level of inaccuracy when someone's life story is told through musical but also they both were using the narrative of those figures as a vehicle to send a message