Hollywood constantly rewrites history in order to tell the story they want to tell,
no matter how untrue or over-embellished. With that in mind, here's a look at some
Historical Films Historians Can't Stand To Watch.
Mel Gibson's 2000 film is pretty blatant about its intentions — you don't call a
movie The Patriot if you're offering up a fair and balanced view of the American Revolution.
On the plus side, Gibson and director Roland Emmerich did consult with the Smithsonian
Institution to get the details right, and the sets and costumes are pretty spot-on as
a result. And the story, about Gibson's South Carolina farmer and war veteran who reluctantly
joins the rebels when his family is violently and brutally attacked, is affecting and well-done.
But when it comes to the portrayal of both the British and Black Americans,
The Patriot goes a bit off the rails. Every British person in the film is a
sadist and a war criminal, in that order, which clearly wasn't true.
"It's an ugly business doing one's duty. But just occasionally, it's a real pleasure."
Mel Gibson's character, meanwhile, is shown treating enslaved Black Americans as equals
who are offered their freedom in return for military service in the American cause.
In fact, enslaved people had a much better chance of gaining
their freedom fighting for the British than the Americans - which is why more
than twice as many Black people joined the British cause over the course of the war.
If all your knowledge about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comes from the excellent,
multiple-Oscar-winning 1984 film Amadeus, you think you know three basic facts: One, Mozart
was a musical genius, which is true. Two, Mozart loved a good fart joke — also true. And three,
Antonio Salieri hated Mozart and conducted a cruel gaslighting campaign to drive him
insane and probably indirectly caused his death – which is almost certainly not true in any way.
It's an amazing film, but it tosses facts out the window in favor of drama. Historian Alex von
Tunzelmann called the film, quote, "laughably wrong" in The Guardian. She noted that the
whole Salieri-hated-Mozart business was fiction drummed up after both were dead, by Russian writer
Alexander Pushkin. The film also explicitly makes many of Mozart's later works seem like failures,
when in fact they were uniformly successful, and that the whole business with Salieri dressing up
like Mozart's dead father to commission the Requiem was heavily fictionalized.
According to BBC Culture, Peter Shaffer, who wrote the play the film was based on,
was up-front about the lack of facts in this historical story, saying,
"Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer,
and the film was even less of one."
You might be surprised to learn that a film directed by Michael Bay,
a man best known for blowing things up in movies about giant robots, is not regarded
as a well-researched historical film, but that's the case with 2001's Pearl Harbor.
While the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is rendered fairly accurately, the film
is riddled with mistakes. Some are small, like characters smoking the wrong type of cigarettes.
But some of the mistakes were apparently intentional, such as the film's depiction
of Japanese planes bombing a hospital. In the actual attack, the Japanese restricted their
attack to military targets only. But films require villains to do terrible things, so
making up this detail helped to make the Japanese seem deserving of good old American vengeance.
Windtalkers came out in the glory days of 2002, when Nicolas Cage was still a
bona-fide A-List movie star and not a slightly crazy B-movie icon screaming about the bees.
"Not the bees! Not the bees!”
No, this was a prestige film telling a story from World War
II that doesn't get a lot of attention: the Navajo Windtalkers.
They really existed, and the US armed forces did, in fact, rely on Navajo code talkers during the
war. As the CIA itself explains, the Navajo language was ideal because of its complexity,
rarity, and lack of written form, which gave the Germans and Japanese nothing to work from.
However, the film took one major liberty when it added in Cage as a soldier assigned to kill one
of the windtalkers if they faced capture. This is just absurdly untrue, so just for the record,
no, the army wasn't sending assassins to murder their own men on the front lines.
"I took my grenade, and I threw it, and I blew him up!"
Flyboys was a 2006 film starring James Franco as a World War I pilot.
It's also a historical mess for a bizarre reason:
The military adviser they hired to consult on the film was a fraud. Yes, it's true: John Livesey
claimed to have served in the Parachute Regiment with combat experience in the Falklands war and
Northern Ireland, but in fact his service was entirely in the Catering Corps, which
may explain why simple details like the model of plane being flown were totally out of whack.
"You think six shooters gonna help you up there?"
"Well, whatever you were using didn't seem to do you much good."
Oliver Stone's whole aesthetic could be described as "reality-adjacent,"
so literally no one expected his 2004 epic historical drama Alexander to be
an educational film about the man who once conquered most of the known world.
But the movie is so disdainful of historical fact that it's basically a work of fiction.
According to DailyHistory.org, Stone completely distorts just about every detail of Alexander
the Great's life. The historical figures are depicted as younger than they actually were,
and Stone deletes important battles from the story, combines others for no reason
aside from convenience, and misrepresents how formidable Alexander's enemies were,
especially the Persians. That means the film actually fails in one of its main
reasons for existence: exploring the military genius of Alexander.
And then there's the fact that it treats the idea of Alexander being bisexual as some
sort of major scandal. In fact, our modern day conceptions of sexual orientation didn't really
exist at the time, and it's more likely people of Alexander’s day wouldn't have cared at all.
Just because your film is an animated feature aimed at kids doesn't let you off the hook for
historical accuracy. Disney's Pocahontas is a delightful movie ... that unfortunately fails
pretty big-time when it comes to getting its facts straight.
First, they invent a romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith that didn't happen. Then,
in order to make that romance work, they change her age: in the film, Pocahontas is an adult,
but in reality she was only about ten years old when she met the 27-year-old Smith,
which makes their on-screen romance a little creepy if you know the actual facts.
Finally, the movie ends when Smith returns home to
England and Pocahontas decides to stay behind with her family — but in reality,
Pocahontas did marry an Englishman many years later and sailed to England with him.
In other words, the only version of the Pocahontas
story that got more wrong than Disney did was Avatar!
It's true that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare's life — there are entire periods of
his life that are a complete blank. That makes it easy to just make stuff up, of course, but
Shakespeare in Love makes the weird decision to also fictionalize the only real facts we do know.
That's because the film suggests that Romeo and Juliet and several other works by Shakespeare
were inspired by an actress who breaks tradition (and the law) by dressing as
a man to pursue her love of acting. In reality, many of Shakespeare's plays were heavily based
on pre-existing works that he was reworking. Plus, the film is explicitly set in 1593,
and many of the works in the film weren't composed until nearly a decade later.
Black Hawk Down is a thrilling war movie. Depicting the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993,
the movie follows a group of US Special Forces soldiers who have to fight their
way through the streets against the forces of a vicious Somali warlord.
That's based on a real event, and the film does a reasonably good job of
depicting the desperation of urban warfare. Unfortunately, as The Guardian points out,
the film gets a lot of really important aspects of the events absolutely wrong.
For one, it ignores the high number of civilians killed in the action,
making it seem like everyone who dies was a voluntary combatant. It also completely ignores
the presence of child soldiers, preferring not to deal with the complex moral questions attached.
Perhaps most egregious is the way the film portrays the American forces not
only as mostly white but also as acting alone when, in fact, they were supported
by a large number of Pakistani and Malaysian soldiers. These soldiers were our allies and
were heavily involved in the battle, but they are completely deleted from the story — the
only Pakistanis we see are fawning servants waiting for the soldiers back at their base.
Pakistan's then-president Pervez Musharraf was so irritated about this that he denounced the movie.
John Wayne was one of the biggest stars of all time. He also wasn't above putting his
personal politics into his films, which is how he made The Alamo as a vehicle
for a certain view of American patriotism that wasn't exactly historically accurate.
First and foremost, it makes it look like the Texans were fighting for the American
way when in reality, of course, Texas wasn't even part of America. It was part of Mexico,
and wouldn't declare independence until after the Alamo; the Texans there were fighting
for their land and their personal freedoms, not to defend America.
And on a smaller level, the film also gives cinematic deaths to famous figures like Jim Bowie
and Davy Crockett. In reality though, historians believe Bowie was too ill to fight, while Crockett
was most likely captured and later executed by the Mexians, as shown in the 2004 remake, The Alamo.
But hey, what are a few inconvenient truths when you have myths to promote?
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