Badmovies.org Forum

Thought this was an interesting article about history being used to 'imaginitive' degrees in movies. Its kinda sad really when you think about how most youth gathers thier information these days...

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/10mosthistoricallyinaccurate.html (http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/10mosthistoricallyinaccurate.html)

They left off two incredibly inaccurate films . .  .
John Wayne's THE ALAMO, which got nothing right about that event but the character's names and who  won the battle;
and THE DA VINCI CODE, whose gross distortions of Christian and New Testament history were so outrageous that nearly any serious Bible scholar got the dry heaves reading the book, much less seeing the movie.

John Wayne's Conqueror, I didn't realize Genghis Khan was actually Caucasian. 

And wore a girdle.

That's great...thanks for posting that.

My GF had to do a report on the historical inaccuracies of The Patriot last semester so I found that rather amusing that the film was on the list.

I wonder why Titanic didn't make the list.  That one simply shouts out "historical inaccuracy". 

Hollywood, being what it is, most of the time doesn't seem to want to make the effort, or spend the time and money it would take to make a historically accurate film. This is a shame because a lot of the flavor of a historical event is in the details, and now, with the advent of the internet, they are available to every one with a PC. I realise that they're in business to make money but a little more time spent in researching the subject of the film would add considerably to the quality of the product they put out for the rest of us to watch, they also would not be misleading millions of people about what happened.

I had recently been reading something about Joseph Merrick, and I was surprised at the degree of historical inaccuracy in The Elephant Man. I'd always thought it was a fairly serious and respectable film.

There was a guy in the 19th century, last name Merrick, who was deformed, worked in sideshows and came to the attention of a noted surgeon - that was as accurate as the movie got. Beyond that, a great deal of dramatic licence was taken. The Wikipedia entry on the movie sums the differences pretty well.

And then there's the end of The Green Berets, where you see the sun setting on the Vietnamese coast -- which happens to face Eastward.

I think what you have to realize is that many Hollywood films are FICTICIOUS stories with a HISTORICAL backdrop - ergo, THE PATRIOT and GLADIATOR. 

I am seeing a growing trend of making historically accurate films on the cable networks.  HBO's ROME, Showtime's THE TUDORS, and the one I just watched part of tonight, JOHN ADAMS on HBO.  All of these are incorporating more and more fact into the their narrative, and doing well commercially.

Titanic should have make the list, as well as Pearl Harbor, as there were some big historical inaccuracies in that film as well.

History can never be as exciting as Bruckheimer film  *lol*

And anyone who is using the movies or tv to give them accurate historical information is just plain dumb to begin with.

Maybe we should come up with a list of the most historically accurate films. I'd start it, but I can't think of any.

I do find it interesting that Mel Gibson with "Apocalypto," "Braveheart," and "The Patriot," has three films on the list. Apparently, more than anyother filmmaker. What does that say about his next historical film?

*face in palm*...why?

10,000 B.C.
Director Roland Emmerich is usually a stickler for realism (see: sending a computer virus via Macintosh to aliens in Independence Day). So we hate to inform him that woolly mammoths were not, in fact, used to build pyramids. Heck, woolly mammoths weren't even found in the desert. They wouldn't need to be woolly if that were the case. And there weren't any pyramids in Egypt until 2,500 B.C or so.

MOVIE? Could it be a MOVIE? Could it possibly be a form of ENTERTAINMENT that isn't meant to be a HISTORY lesson? I like movie articles, they're really fun a lot of the time. However, writing a list for the sake of doing it is stupid. So many people are saying ""insert movie" isn't accurate!"

*punch*

300 is based on a comic book. That's it, nothing else is claimed.
The bad guy in Gladiator was whiney. Gee, maybe because in movies you're supposed to... not like the bad guy?
10,000 BC... I won't even say that it's just a movie anymore because some folks just love to wail on it.

Apologies, this is one of those topics that burns me a little. Surely people can tell that a movie isn't real :question:

I really wish that were true, but unfortunately there are a huge number of people who believe that everything they see in a movie or TV show is true, or at least technically accurate. 

It's sad that people believe what they see on TV or in a movie.  If they didn't many people wouldn't have wacky views about the Martial Arts.

Darn! Wouldn't you know it? As soon as I log off, I thought of a couple of films are historically accurate, plus being good films as well. While not 100% accurate, they are probably more accurate than most historical films. Of course, they are "Glory" and "The Bounty."

Actually, since I have always been interested in how characters relate to each other in a film, I have a list of films, divided by century, that depict the most accurate character relationships, that I have found, if nothing else.

14th The Reckoning
15th The Messenger
----  Romeo and Juliet (1968)
16th Lady Jane
17th The 3 Musketeers (1970)
---- The 4 Musketeers
18th Barry Lyndon
---- The Bounty
---- Brotherhood of the Wolf
19th The Alamo (2004)
---- Glory
---- Shane
20th Lair of the White Worm
---- Two Brothers
Multiple The Greatest Game Ever Played

uh-huuurr-huuurr-huuurr! Teh Transporter 7w0 is t0t4ly r34list1c!

People don't want movies to be about real life.  They can look out their windows for that.  What they want is movies to appear to mirror real life and then they wish life was actually like that.

Think about some of the movies you've seen.  Can you imagine if life was actually like that?  Cars that explode when they hit another car.  A person getting shot multiple times and still being able to stand up.  Unimaginable beasties attacking major cities.  Viruses causing people to become zombies.  Vampires attacking Alaskan towns.  Psycho killers coming back to life time and again.

Sure, it'd be exciting.  But life would be worse than a war zone.

I think the distinction is in what the movie sets out to do, or at least claims to be doing.

We've all made our positions on nitpicking pretty clear, thanks to Wyrewizard. I don't think this is about fictional technologies or tweaking the laws of physics for entertainment value, but more about events presented as factual which are not.

There's nothing wrong with tweaking details, compressing timelines or cutting down on characters to make the story work better as a film, or setting a fictional story within an actual event. However, you have to get the big stuff right.

The Great Escape was a highly fictionalized account, but it worked because they got the basic history right and avoided any glaring anachronisms.

On the other hand, The Elephant Man had Frederick Treves rescuing Joseph Merrick (erroneously called John Merrick) from an abusive sideshow promoter, when in fact, Merrick was well treated in the sideshow, earned a decent living and actually approached the doctor for help with his condition. That's just too much dramatic licence for a film claiming to be biographical.

I just saw Billie August's woeful Goodbye Bafana which deals with the supposed close relationship between Nelson Mandela and his last warder, James Gregory. Mr Mandela has been quoted as saying that his relationship with Gregory was not close at all and certainly not as close as shown in the film.

What I like is when sanctimonius intellectual-wannabes like the writers of this Yahoo List spout off incorrect facts or gross misinterpretations in their effort to point out the stupidity of others.

See, the problem is that their list does about as much harm to 'history education' as the movies they deride.  Rather than correcting mistakes, they compound them.

My example?  THE PATRIOT.  If Gibson's character was based on Francis Marion, why don't they mention Marion was nowhere near Guilford's Courthouse, which is the obvious nitpick.  But no, rather they focus on the fact that the Patriots "lost" that battle.

While this is technically true, this battle is a classic example of a Pyrrhic Victory - a battle in which the 'winning side' really lost in the strategic sense.  Cornwallis' Army was so devasted at Guilford's Courthouse that it never really recovered.  Most actual scholars on the American Revolution consider this one of the key battles that ultimately led to Corwallis' surrender, and thus American victory, in the war.

Okay, what about Marion's killing "innocent Cherokees" as their attempt at character assassination?  Yes, Marion was a participant in the Indian Wars fought in the mountains of NC and TN.  As did Daniel Morgan (of King's Mountain fame, who actually WAS at Guilford's Courthouse) and other prominent officers of the Continental Army doing the King's Service in the colonies before the rebellion.  In fact, it was probably from the Cherokees (and their neighbors) that he learned much of what he applied later in the sandhillls of SC in terms of guerilla warfare wherein he became probably the most significant figure in the lineage of the modern US Army Rangers.

The way it's worded, the Yahoos at Yahoo make it sound like Marion was sport killing Indians during that period that 'pop' history traditionally shows "us vs them"  - post Civil War settlement of the West.  In other words, he did not "pursue and murder" innocent Cherokees, he was a soldier in an Army engaged in warfare.  We can debate the morality of that war with 200 years of hindsight, but that does not change the fact that warfare is not murder (and it's not like the Cherokees just laid down and got slaughtered).

Geez.  If we are going to have an article on historical accuracy on Yahoo, we should at least hope for some accuracy in THAT article.