Back to One: Historical Films, part deux

The Good, The Bad and The Inaccurate

25/8/21 Lymond 47

Last week, we touched on The Good historical films. This week let’s chat about the Bad and the Inaccurate.

Let’s start with The Bad – yes, I worked on Titanic and yes it made a lot of money. Do I think it’s a good film? Absolutely not – but I do think it is infinitely better than Michael Bay’s attempt at Pearl Harbor. And, that’s not saying much. The two films are similar in that they set up insipid love triangles against the backdrop of two of history’s most iconic tragedies. Yes, there’s a lot of action and a lot of drama in both, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor was such a catastrophic event that it finally brought the US into WW2 causing even more casualties and it really deserves a better film.

To start with, between the racism and the sexism, the love story is convoluted and lame. Kate Beckinsale falls in love with Ben Affleck, then he’s thought to be killed so she falls in love with Josh Hartnett. Ben returns from the dead to find Kate and Josh together, but then …SPOILER ALERT… Josh is killed and Kate is pregnant. It’s insanely complicated for no reason.

There are lots of inaccuracies in the film – like Cuba Gooding Jr’s character, Petty Officer Doris Miller would have been treated by black nurses, not pearly white Kate Beckinsale and the Japanese didn’t deliberately try to bomb the hospital. There is also some wrong equipment from the wrong time periods like a nuclear submarine and E-2 Hawkeyes being present in the attack which I couldn’t even spot in the footage. But these aren’t even really a problem for me – it’s mostly that the dialog is atrocious and I think I just can’t stand Ben Affleck. I have only ever watched this movie once. I actually tried to rewatch it to write this post – but mostly fast forwarded through it – so not technically a rewatch. I will say that the attack with all of the explosions and carnage is exciting and the cinematography is actually quite beautiful, but you might as well watch From Here to Eternity from 1953 instead.

Now on to The Inaccurate – don’t get me wrong – I love Braveheart – but it’s probably one of the most inaccurate “historical” films ever made. I’m not one to quibble with every little inaccurate issue in a film – most of the time if the story is good I don’t even notice most things – but Braveheart really took a lot of liberties with it’s story and timeline.

  • The worst in my opinion – made Scottish hero Robert the Bruce and the actual “Braveheart”- a bad guy
  • Added in a weird romance element with Isabella of France – who would have been a child during the time this story is set
  • A tartan kilt was not worn until possibly the 16th century
  • Blue face paint was not worn in battle at this time
  • William Wallace was most likely of noble birth and already a Knight at this point
  • Most historians believe that Prime Noctis(the English men enjoying a Scottish woman’s first wedding night) – did not exist
  • There is no bridge present at the Battle of Stirling Bridge – which was why the English were so easily picked off
  • The Irish did not take part in the Battle of Falkirk
  • Wallace used a two handed claymore when he more than likely would have had a one handed sword and a shield
  • King Edward I actually died two years after Wallace’s death
  • Unfortunately for Clever Name Here dba “Black Rod” – no one is hit by a bus

There are others – but these are the most noticeable. If you’re interested in a Historical Inaccuracies in Movies rabbit hole – I highly recommend this An Historian Goes to the Movies.

So, Deadsplinterhearts – what are the bad and/or inaccurate historical films you love or hate? And, as always, thanks for your support and stopping by.

The answer to last week’s poll is: B) Colin Farrell – I could always tell what he’d been drinking the night before – but he was a nice guy.

This week’s poll:

Which of these actors do you think chased my sister around the set in a tux? She wanted to meet him - then chickened out because she was so starstruck when I was going to introduce them - that she ran away. He chased her down saying that he'd heard she was there and he always wanted to meet her. It was actually a really cute exchange.
16 votes · 16 answers
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47 Comments

  1. For me, it’s almost every single war movie made prior to Saving Private Ryan–mostly because of the glorification and hero worship inherent in those films.  SPR was, if not the first, certainly the biggest film to really show the horror of it all at that point in time.  Every time I see one of those hideous John Wayne films I think of the part in All Quiet on the Western Front when the shell shocked student comes home and gives his former teacher an earful about feeding them full of crap about how war was such a heroic endeavor.

    I’m guessing Colin Farrell on this one because he’s the only one I can picture in a tux.

    • I can’t rewatch Saving Private Ryan – the whole premise that a bunch of men have to risk their lives to search for and bring back one man is abhorrent to me. I know that’s the point – but it’s too awful to watch. 
       
      And, although I agree about the early war movies – I think for me, Platoon was the big eye opener for how brutal war can be. 

  2. There at least a dozen filmed versions of Titanic and I think I’ve seen them all, at least once, including the 1943 German production which is a great piece of Nazi propaganda. Hitler and his inner circle hated it because it took forever to make and had a cast of thousands, and a lot of the men were prime candidates for the Reichswehr but they were kept out of the war while filming. It also cost much, much money.

    Anyway, every single version has a love triangle. It’s uncanny. I can’t be arsed to research this to jog my memory but I believe the first Titanic was a silent, so it would have been well within the memory of the theater-goers, and that had a love triangle. What do you need to make a Titanic movie? Big ship, iceberg, love triangle where the woman is somehow affiliated with a “suitable” partner but falls for someone else that others find undesirable…

    • I have a hard time watching 1996 Titanic because even to this day – basically 25 years later – I can still remember where I was standing during most of the shots. And, we all thought it was going to tank(pardon the pun). The script was terrible and the acting was terrible. We made fun of the dialog all of the time.  I also think it was lit like a movie of the week – all overhead. I know that I have a different relationship to it than most people, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of having worked on it. 

      • That is why I love Titanic (this version) so much. A Night to Remember is much, much better, and the Nazi version has an interesting plot.  German naval hero, but WWI hasn’t been fought yet, is brought aboard because the English are so lame. There’s a huge amount of anti-capitalist, anti-plutocrat socialism. They didn’t call themselves the National Socialists for nothing, but theirs was obviously Socialism in its most brutal form, there is no “one,” just “the Volk”, working ever harder to achieve national ends.

        But anyway, 1996’s Titanic has so many great lines. The most famous of them come in handy. Sometimes Better Half will invade my bathroom when I’m in the shower looking for something he’s run out of in his bathroom, and I will call out, “Paint me like one of your French girls!” “Shut up. Do you have any toothpaste in here?”

        Or sometimes people at parties (remember those?) will ask, “So how long have you two been together anyway?” I always croak out, “It’s been 84 years….” Which, by the way, since Kate Winslet was engaged, did they ever say how she was? I don’t think they ever did, but say she was 20. That would make the character 104, and there she is on the research ship…

        Did you happen to get chummy with the actor who played the sailor who does a half-gainer over the side and bounces off the propeller? A highlight.

      • I definitely remember the press running up to its release: just more reports of the troubled production with the grossly swelled budget. I, too, assumed it would be a flop and was surprised it did so well. The fact that it tied All About Eve for most Oscar nominations, and then Ben-Hur for wins still doesn’t sit well with me, though. 

        • My friend worked on it with me and on the first day it was released – we were working on a completely different film – a bunch of us went to see it.   Me and the friend were laughing through most of it – watching certain stunt people fall off the ship two and three times in different outfits – watching actors that originally only had one line and one day of work end up on the show for six months and in multiple scene s- reminiscing about who got fired over what screw up  – until one of our coworkers elbowed me and told me we needed to “read the room”.
          Friend and I looked around and everyone was bawling their eyes out.  Of course, that only made us giggle more – but luckily we were drowned out by all of the sobbing. We couldn’t believe the reactions were so intense to it. 

  3. For reasons I’ve enumerated in my “Ask Lemmy” columns, JFK.  There are some further flaws, leaps of logic, and inventions that I haven’t talked about as well.  Why not shoot Kennedy as he approaches the warehouse?  Because, dummy, then you’ve probably blocked off your escape route.  The character “X” portrayed by Donald Sutherland is suspected to be loosely based on a guy named Fletcher Prouty, but presents a conglomeration of questionable and outright false information.  An inordinate number of weird coincidences happening at the same time is not evidence of a conspiracy.
     
    I still enjoy it as a film, though.

    • And the plume of smoke that comes out of the “grassy knoll” rifle is absolutely comical.  Was he firing a fucking musket?  I’ve never seen smoke like that come out of any gun, and I’ve shot a fair number of them.

    • I had a high school social studies teacher that was obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. This was before JFK came out. He was convinced of a conspiracy. We spent an entire quarter on it. Read the Warren Report. Watched the Zapruder film over and over. In class. He even went to Dealey Plaza and reenacted pretty much every part of it. So, my intro into JFK was through the conspiracy angle. I believed it for a long time because that was how I learned it. Now, I don’t – so don’t worry. 

      • Have you ever seen Slackers? That’s another movie people either love or hate. I love it. People cross paths so you follow A, who meets up with B, they interact, then you follow B, etc. One of the characters meets a stranger in a bookstore and he invites her over. He has a view of the famous Bell Tower (the movie was set and filmed in Austin) but more importantly he’s obsessed with the JFK assassination.

  4. I was going to guess Colin Farrell last week, but didn’t do it out loud.  I’ve never actually seen any of his movies, but I remember him being the “it” Hollywood Bad Boy that was being shoved down our throats at the time.

  5. hmmm..the most innacurate historical movie i ever watched
    probably this one


    i mean…we all know hittler never rode a t-rex
    he had mechanical sheppard named goebels he rode around on

  6. While not technically a historical movie The Outlaw Josey Wales, offers a terribly biased version of post civil war America. And along with the popularity of Southern rock of the 1970’s helped give rise to the acceptance of the noble Lost Cause bullshit by another generation, including Northerners. I hate this movie, based on the book written by KKK member and George Wallace speechwriter Asa Earl Carter. And I hate even more how beloved it is. 

    • I know I’ve seen it – but I can’t remember a thing about it. Might have to rewatch it to remember. 
       
      Being from Atlanta – Gone With the Wind is the holy grail of Southern lost causes movies. 

      • A poor Southern farmers family is murdered by the evil Union Army. He joins a group of likewise ill treated Southern raiders to get his revenge. He’s strong and noble, all Union soldiers are petty, cowardly, and bad, blah, blah, blah. Don’t watch it. Think of it as a companion piece to Gone With the Wind.

  7. oh also…im going with heath ledger on that poll
    he always struck me as the kind of guy that would do that kind of shit
    a geniunely kind soul if you will….probably also why hes no longer with us
    (i could be miles off…but thats my impression)

  9. So I got an art history degree which means sometimes I cannot fucking stand historical movies.

    Case in point – 1965 The Agony and the Ecstacy

    First, they did a really shit job with the process for how he did the frescoes and overexaggerated it. 

    Second, the love plot with one of the Medici daughters? And an artist? NOPE they would not have allowed that.

    Third and most importantly, there is really no reason to believe Michelangelo was interested in women sexually, so that unnecessary love plot is just fucking insulting because it’s like they wanted to yell no homo about an artist. I get that Charlton Heston wouldn’t play a homosexual character, but they could have just excluded the romance plot entirely.

    Also, I thought Gladiator was stupid in many ways not least of which is it opened in the Fields of Elysium and I was like WOW FORESHADOWING SHOULD NOT BE SO BLATANT

  10. Also, fucking Mel Gibson and Apocalypto.

    I will freely admit I definitely appreciated having the language be Yucatec Mayan, even though we don’t know if that dialect of Mayan would have been spoken right at the time of the movie.

    The movie shows what is supposed to be the Maya civilization collapsing, but the timing makes no sense archaeologically for what they see and the arrival of Spaniards at the end of the movie.

    They weren’t living in stick huts hunting in the jungle like that. Maya civilization was agrarian with managed forests and villages. 

    Fucking Richard Hansen, their expert Mayanist, is a preclassic expert and this movie is set in the postclassic period, so his expertise is like 1000 years too old for architectural and visual details. The pyramids are wrong for the century the movie is set in. This really really annoyed me. 

    The mass sacrifice in the movie is more Aztec than Maya, but I guess that wasn’t good for the message Gibson wanted.

    Signed, that anthropology degree is also pretty strong in me. 

  11. Knowing the fact that Heather planted the giant kiss on the one superfan (who fainted afterward!), He’s my first guess (Somerhalder is a VERY distant second😉).
     
    And speaking of historical with terrible accuracy… 
    The first one that springs to mind is this one, which is basically–costume-wise, anyway– what I’d imagine one would get, if they took MASSIVE amounts of acid, then perused *one* art history book for… approximately twenty minutes?🤔🙃🤣


     
    This pretty much sums up my opinion of the costumes (for the TL/DR folks–basically a combo of “WTF?!? & DIAF!!!”😉)
     
    (I’ll see if I can find the WORST dress scene in a “middle ages” movie, and attach it in a comment on this one, because with my luck lately if I try to find it now, I’ll lose this whole comment😉🤣)

      • 2:48 of this clip is the *first* time you notice the GIANT back zipper on her dress🙄🙄🙄
         
        You’ll notice it *again* as the camera pans around them at approximately 3:22!

    • Not that I’m a huge “Knight’s Tale” fan but I always thought it was meant to NOT be historically accurate in the least — sort of the reverse version of “Romeo + Juliet” from the 90s that was semi-modernized. (The zipper thing is hilarious, though.)

      • I replied to Lomond, too, but it was always the half-assed-ness that got me.😉
         
        The fact that so many of the DUDES’ costumes *were* fairly accurate, with fabrics that were passable to the era, and silhouettes that were fairly spot-on for the time/place it was set… yeah, there were 100% liberties taken…. buuuut on the whole, the guys costumes did usually have an accurate base they started from…
         
        Which was why the women’s costumes did & DO annoy all the costume geeks i know so incredibly much… it’s almost like whoever costumed it was told, “We’re setting the movie in ______, go research it!,” then the costumer got halfway through, was called back in and told on a Friday, “Timeline’s been moved up, you gotta be ready to film  in three days, go shop for your fabrics now, we fly out tomorrow, see ya on set, i expect first looks at 8am on Monday!

      • Also, re that 90’s R&J thing–i can definitely see where you’re coming from–but again, it’s the laziness & half-assery, in Knight’s Tale…
         
        Because, again–from a costume-geek’s standpoint–most of us LOVED the “modern” R&J, because it really did go “over the top modern-trash-fantasy-costume…. 
         
        The costumes were balls-out FANTASY-TRASH,(😉😁🤗) but *that* “no fucks to give” attitude was why they became so iconic–Leo’s “Thrift-Store-Halloween-Section” armor, and Claire’s “Juliet Wings that launched a bajillion *angel wings for cool girls lewkz!!!*(🙄🤭🤣) were SO “over the top trash” that they were fun….
        And rather than going balls-out like that, and leaning into the batshit… Knight’s tale was just so… mealy-mouthed & wishy-washy about it.😕

    • I worked on a lot of CW shows and A Knights Tale is what I dub “CW period” meaning sleek and sexy modern with a hint of period details.

  12. The answer, the all-time winner, the GOAT of GOATS, the Ken Jennings and Joe DiMaggio and Michael Phelps of bad historical movies is “Birth of a Nation,” which shaped the post-Confederate mindset that we [checks notes] yup, still have going strong today.

    “Pearl Harbor” is a god-awful movie, and I’m glad you shat upon it. (So is “Titanic” but I knew when it came out that it was a movie for people who weren’t me, so I never bothered. Still haven’t sat and watched the whole thing.) 

    A few others worth noting: “300” which is almost hilariously reactionary and inaccurate but worst of all gave Zack Snyder cachet; every Mel Gibson historical piece; every Oliver Stone historical piece post-1990; and an all-time classic of the genre: “Pocahontas,” which is absolutely horrifying if you are aware at all of the source material. Until Disney disnifies “Triumph of the Will,” for Disney+, it’s gonna be the worst story every told by the house of mouse.

  13. …I have a feeling that if I really think about it I could end up with entirely too many candidates…so I’m going with the first two that came to mind…the one I had to look up where apparently the US were the ones who managed to lay their hands on an enigma machine…I had to look it up because on the basis is was that full of shit I never did watch the thing

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141926/

    …& the one a friend of mine liked to refer to as “dances with swords”

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325710/

    …but there are basically too many to count?

    • Yes – although I agree on both – I worked on a different movie with Kevin Costner and one day  was telling a story about them shooting the buffalo hunt. He said that they had to have a massive amount of land just to shoot it and that they needed at least a mile to get the buffalo to stop running. – which when you think about the logistics of that scene – it must have been pretty amazing.

      • …yeah…that must have been quite a sight…& to be fair both that & tom-cruise-is-a-samurai were films that looked pretty great…it was just the underlying stuff that sort of made me despair a little

        …there are almost certainly better examples of films that are terrible in terms of historical accuracy but I seem to have spent entirely too much of my day so far messing about online so I was trying not to dive down another rabbit hole

    • Re “Dances with Swords” (excellent Title, btw!😉😆🤣), there WERE three fabulous things in that movie…
       
      The scenery was STUNNING (beautiful backgrounds!), Ken Watanabe’s acting (the man made the movie bearable to watch!), and the costumes WERE pretty in that one! (Not positive on the accuracy, because I never had cause to study Japanese clothing in-depth for any of the shows I worked on, though–but PRETTY, nonetheless!)

      • …based solely on having watched a whole lot of samurai-period films not made in hollywood…I think they did all right on the accuracy costume-wise…in so far as I couldn’t see anything that I’m not used to seeing in those kinds of films?

        …& I agree the setting (& the way it was shot) generally looked fantastic…&watanabe is generally pretty great to watch…but that alternate title really did sum up a lot of what I thought of the overall deal on account of cruise’s character…dances with wolves also looked pretty fantastic & had a lot of good performances by supporting cast members…but…then there was the but, you know?

        …so I’d still take something like the twilight samurai…or yojimbo…or shogun assassin…or seven samurai…or or zatoichi…or…it‘s a long list & I’d sooner watch all of it than the last samurai again?

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