In order to turn a historical film into effective entertainment, some liberties have to be taken
with the actual history. But some movies irritate actual historians to no end because they get
their history so very, very wrong.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a stunning tragedy in our nation's
history: a young and popular president shot to death in broad daylight while seated next
to his wife and surrounded by Secret Service agents. It also remains fertile ground for
conspiracy theories involving everything from the CIA to communist spies to the Mafia.
"It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"
Oliver Stone's main ambition seems to have been cramming every single one into his incredibly
well-made film, and the historical accuracy suffered as a result. Stone once told The
New York Times:
"It is not a true story per se."
JFK is as far from a documentary as it can possibly get, yet it's so well-crafted that
it often makes people think it's more accurate than it is.
The Washington Post calls the film, quote, "barely factual." Stone used the 1969 trial
of Clay Shaw, who was brought on charges by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison,
as the core of his script. But as noted in The Atlantic, Garrison's case fell apart when
it was revealed that his key witness had been drugged and recanted his testimony. Stone
solves this by deleting the actual witness and replacing him with a fictional character
played by Kevin Bacon and that's just one of many brazen fabrications the director presents
with the utmost seriousness.
Gladiator is a great movie. The story of a Roman general who is betrayed by the treacherous
son of the emperor and forced to fight as an anonymous gladiator in order to get close
enough for his revenge, it evokes the Roman Empire extremely well, even if it is a film
notorious for the magical pillow that appears under Russell Crowe's head during his death
scene.
"Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?"
But as good-looking and dramatic as Gladiator is, when Daily History broke down its historical
accuracy, it was found to be completely wanting. From the clothes worn by the German barbarians
in the film's opening battle to the extreme unlikelihood that Emperor Marcus Aurelius
would, or could, convey imperial power to a general as depicted, the movie gets a lot
of stuff wrong. For example, in the film, the emperor doesn't like or trust his son,
Commodus, who then kills his father in order to seize the throne. But in reality, Aurelius
named Commodus co-emperor 14 years before his death, and Commodus took power peacefully.
Most egregiously, of course, the film shows Emperor Commodus dying at the hands of Russel
Crowe's Maximus. Commodus was widely disliked, but he was actually assassinated in his bath
in 192 CE after ruling the empire for 12 long years. It's little wonder that many of the
consultants hired to guide the historical accuracy of the film asked not to be listed
in the credits.
U-571 is a tense, entertaining war movie about an American submarine crew that poses as German
sailors to board a damaged German U-boat and steal the Enigma code machine on board. The
Enigma machines were used to decrypt coded messages for the Nazis, and the Allies' inability
to crack those codes was a real problem in the early days of World War II.
"And our inability to decipher their messages is costing us this war."
That gives the story some great stakes and real tension.
Unfortunately, it also makes the film probably one of the least historically accurate ever
made. Where some historical movies are content to get a few details here and there wrong,
according to The Guardian:
"[U-571] was so inaccurate that it was damned by the UK parliament as an affront to the
real sailors."
That's the number one problem: The film was inspired by Operation Primrose, in which a
crew of British sailors boarded a German submarine and captured the code books that were needed
to use the Enigma machines. In the real world, the Allies already had several working Enigmas.
What they lacked were the code books. And all this was accomplished in May, 1941, a
year before the film's setting, and incidentally months before the United States was even in
the war. No wonder the British weren't happy that the film showed Americans being the big
heroes when they weren't even involved!
The fact that U-571 was never captured but was actually sunk, in 1944, is just icing
on the cake.
Samurai are cool. In the 2003 film The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays a former US Army
officer who's going through some serious PTSD and who takes a job helping to modernize Japan's
military. He's seduced into supporting a doomed but noble samurai rebellion, training to become
a samurai warrior even as the way of life they represent is about to be destroyed forever.
"Do you believe a man can change his destiny?"
"I think a man does what he can."
It's an excellent narrative, and it's largely based on the true story of Saigo Takamori.
As historian Mark Ravina explains, after helping to restore the power of the emperor in what
is known as the Meiji Restoration, Takamori was shocked when the emperor turned around
and stripped the samurai of their power and privileges. So Takamori led a rebellion.
Unfortunately, the film isn't very concerned with historical accuracy. While it's true
that Japan hired Western consultants like that, none of them were American. And the
samurai were also familiar with modern weaponry and would have used firearms in their battles.
Worse, the samurai cause isn't presented realistically. In reality, it was more about class. The creation
of a modern professional army elevated a class of people the samurai regarded as beneath
them, and the main motive was to maintain their power and wealth. And, of course, the
film shows ninjas attacking the samurai. Ninjas make everything better, but Japan hadn't seen
actual ninjas in centuries by that point in history.
Argo is a great movie. Based on the real-life rescue of American diplomatic workers hidden
by their Canadian peers for months after the Iranian revolution in 1979, it's easy to see
why it won the Oscar for Best Film in 2013. The story of a fake sci-fi film production
funded by the CIA as cover for a tense rescue operation is entertaining as heck.
"Look, I…I gotta tell you, we did suicide missions in the army that had better odds
than this."
It's too bad that almost nothing shown in the film actually happened. It might as well
be considered fiction.
Sure, the whole fake film operation that allowed the Americans to assume the identities of
a Canadian film crew in order to escape Tehran is 100-percent true. But as Indiewire reports,
almost all of the details in the film are wrong. Scenes like the one in which the Americans
are forced to somehow pretend they know what they're doing in a public market while suspicious
Iranians watch them closely, or when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chases their plane as
it races for takeoff, simply never happened. And as Slate notes, the character of Lester
Siegel is entirely fictional, as the movie erases several real heroes who actually existed
and risked their lives to perform the rescue, most of whom were actually Canadian.
Roland Emmerich is a director known for two things: Big, splashy effects-driven movies
and wild historical, scientific, and general inaccuracy. That doesn't make his films any
less fun to watch, but it does land them in videos like this one.
And 10,000 BC may be Emmerich's greatest achievement in terms of historical inaccuracy. The film's
list of lavish historical errors include the depiction of civilizations using steel, where
the earliest examples date to about 1800 BC. And then there are those enormous, thriving
cities happening thousands of years before the invention of agriculture...or, you know,
the invention of cities.
As Slate notes, most of the trappings of civilization the film shows, monuments, language, and farming,
wouldn't show up for thousands of years.
This is some ambitious historical inaccuracy, is what we're saying.
Everyone loves 300 as a movie. Gerard Butler in a loincloth?
"This! Is! Sparta!"
Hyper-stylized battle scenes? A King of Persia who's apparently 16 feet tall and not entirely
human? The Immortals? Yes, please.
But for a film explicitly based on real people and a real and extremely important historical
event, its entire attitude toward historical accuracy is pretty laid-back. We hope it's
not necessary to explain that the legendary Spartan warriors probably didn't go into battle
wearing what are essentially loincloths and body oil, as History Vs. Hollywood explains,
they most likely wore armor like every other sensible fighting force of the time.
The Guardian notes that just about every aspect of the invading Persian army is wrong, too.
In the film, the Persian Emperor, Xerxes, summons warriors from all corners of his empire
to throw at the Spartans. But in reality, the warriors that are shown come from much
later in history — and most were never under the control of the Persian Empire, even at
its largest extent... which was pretty large. But the film's worst sin is positioning the
Spartans as defenders of democracy and freedom. In reality, they were a society built on the
exploitation of slave labor. But you wouldn't know that from the film.
Enemy at the Gates is a 2001 film starring Jude Law and Ed Harris as rival snipers, the
former defending Stalingrad for the Soviet Union, the latter part of the invading Nazi
forces, who engage in an epic showdown that turns the tide of the battle. It's a tense
and gritty story set against one of the most famous battles in modern history, one that's
estimated to have lost as many as two million soldiers over the course of the siege.
Many see the battle as a turning point in World War II, as the Nazi forces were trapped
and slowly whittled down over the course of five months, until they finally surrendered
because they literally had no food or ammunition left.
According to historian Antony Beevor, Paramount Pictures bought the script with the understanding
that it was based on a true story, which was awkward, because he had just discovered evidence
that the whole story was essentially an invention of Russian propaganda. Although Law's character
was based on a real Soviet sniper, there was never a rival Nazi sniper, much less a complex
game of sniper chess between the two as depicted in the film. But the director, Jean-Jacques
Annaud, continues to describe the film as based on a true story.
There's little doubt that Winston Churchill was one of the most fascinating figures of
the 20th century, or that Gary Oldman's performance as the former British Prime Minister in 2018's
Darkest Hour is excellent. Churchill was an incredibly capable leader and remains a massively
important historical figure, but as good as it is, the film gets much of the story wrong.
"Are you crying?"
"I, uh, yes, yes."
First and foremost, Churchill is portrayed as a drunk, broken old man when World War
II erupts. But as Antony Beevor explains in The Guardian, although he'd been pushed out
of the main corridors of power, Churchill still had a lot of influence and support in
the government and the Conservative Party at the time. Worse, the pivotal scene where
Churchill rides the London Underground and is convinced by a group of "ordinary" Londoners
to resist Hitler to the last breath is completely made up.
As Beevor says dryly, the London Underground was a place the snobbish Churchill, quote,
"had never set foot in his life."
The film also avoids many of Churchill's flaws, like his flagrant racism and classism, while
giving credit for his brilliant leadership to a chance encounter with a bunch of anonymous
citizens on a train. Churchill was many things, but this film only chose to show him as one
specific thing, which just wasn't the case.
This 1995 film starring Mel Gibson depicts the very real William Wallace and his very
real First War of Scottish Independence during the 13th century.
"They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!"
It's a stirring, exciting story, and Gibson's performance remains iconic in modern cinema,
but it gets a failing grade when it comes to historical accuracy. Literally. Historian
Alex von Tunzelmann gave it a "Fail" in her review for The Guardian.
Von Tunzelmann's laundry list of historical errors is striking in how easily some could
have been avoided. The opening voice-over declares that King Alexander III of Scotland
died in 1280, when he actually died in 1286. William Wallace is depicted as growing up
poor, whereas the real Wallace was wealthy. And the Battle of Stirling Bridge is set in
a grassy field where there is an incredible lack of bridges. It's almost like they're
not even trying.
In order to engineer a love interest for Wallace, the film also plays fast and loose with time
and space. As War History Online notes, Princess Isabella, who in the movie becomes pregnant
with Wallace's child after they fall in love, was in reality just nine years old when Wallace
died.
Perhaps the most blatant indication that the filmmakers just didn't care is the way the
Scottish warriors are costumed. On the one hand, they paint their faces as if they're
the ancient Celt and Pict tribes that lived in Britain during Roman times, a thousand
years before the setting of the movie. On the other hand, they're wearing kilts, which
wouldn't be invented for centuries to come.
Oh well. At least we have,
"Our freedom!"
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