What are the most misleading (inaccurate and/or agenda pushing) historical movies ever!? (Poll included)

[Valka D'Ur]

You have to decide for yourself what the dealbreaker would be when watching historical drama.

Sometimes I'm willing to overlook stuff for a good story. But if the story isn't that great, everything else just becomes annoying.

Reign seems to be either at one end of the spectrum or the other. The people who love it are completely clueless about history, and are just in it for the eye candy (cute guys and fancy dresses). The people who hate it wonder why the showrunners even bothered with a show that's supposedly based on history, if they were just going to make the history up anyway.

There's not much that's historically accurate about that show, other than Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and Catherine d'Medici were all real people. The rest of the show is made-up BS. There's a costume analyst and historian on YouTube who almost fell off her chair laughing at the costumes in Reign. Actually, I nearly fell off my chair laughing at them, because they're not remotely accurate to that historical period, or even location.

Kinda like that godawful burgundy prom dress Morgana wears in the first season of Merlin - not remotely appropriate to the time period that show takes place in (not the only anachronistic element, of course, but besides the tomato sandwiches, that dress is what stood out for me).

 

[Plotinus]

But everything in the classic Arthurian stories is anachronistic. When Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory and the rest told their tales of knights errant they were importing what were to them contemporary (or recently past) values, technology, and society into what was supposedly a fifth- or sixth-century setting that would in reality have been wildly different. And that’s even before you get to all the, you know, magic and dragons. Malory didn’t care about anachronism when he filled post-Roman Britain with French-speaking aristocrats jousting in plate armour. Merlin was just doing exactly the same thing.

 

[Ajidica]

Semi-related: It was eye opening reading Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur and learning just how much of 'Arthurian Britain' is based on glosses and baseless assumptions.

 

[Plotinus]

I live just a few miles from the actual grave of King Arthur (um, possibly), so the history of Arthurian myth-making is vividly present!

(It’s a short walk from the Isle of Avalon, but Camelot’s a bit of a way down the A303 and hasn’t aged well.)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

But everything in the classic Arthurian stories is anachronistic. When Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory and the rest told their tales of knights errant they were importing what were to them contemporary (or recently past) values, technology, and society into what was supposedly a fifth- or sixth-century setting that would in reality have been wildly different. And that’s even before you get to all the, you know, magic and dragons. Malory didn’t care about anachronism when he filled post-Roman Britain with French-speaking aristocrats jousting in plate armour. Merlin was just doing exactly the same thing.

I've seen the story of Arthur presented in a variety of ways. There's the Disney stuff, which I saw a long time ago and don't remember clearly.

I had to read Morte d'Arthur in college and most of it sailed over my head because that was a few years before I became hooked on Dragonlance and discovered that I actually enjoy some kinds of fantasy besides basic D&D and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

I'd seen Camelot on TV (the musical) and just sat back and enjoyed the music. The story didn't make much sense at the time. Years later, I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism and learned so much more. The after that, I worked on a production of Camelot... and was bemused at how much they got wrong (I wasn't in any position to influence that, since my job was on the dressing crew).

I helped Lancelot in and out of his costumes since most were quick changes that he had no time for if he had to go downstairs to the dressing room, so he had to be changed in the wings in very dim light, very quietly... and one night a fastening on his breastplate gave out. It popped right on stage, during a quiet scene that had conversation, rather than music. As he exited stage left, his armor went creak... creak... creak... with every step. The actor held it together until he got past the sight lines, while the rest of us in the wings (the stage crew and me) were trying desperately not to laugh.

Then he grinned a huge grin, and I promised to get it fixed during intermission. I snagged Arthur's dresser to come help, and told her we should check Arthur's armor and also Pellinore's (Pellinore didn't have a dresser, but should have; he had a really fast change that kinda mattered since his back-to-back scenes took place 5 years apart in-story).

A trip to the scene shop later, we discovered that yep, Arthur's armor would have popped soon. Pellinore's wasn't quite as bad (fewer scenes), but it would have happened eventually. So we fixed all three... in 20 minutes. They held up throughout the rest of the run.


After the show opened, a couple of people from the SCA group went to see it and at the next Arts & Sciences meeting we had, they proceeded to tell me everything wrong with it, from the ridiculous heraldry that wasn't remotely accurate, to the set design, to the costumes, to the armor... yeah, the armor was bad for accuracy. I pointed out that these were actors who had to be able to move, sing, and dance, and weren't used to doing that in the same kind of armor that fighters in the SCA wear (yes, knights in the SCA are expected to be able to dance while wearing armor; I witnessed that for myself during a principality tournament).

So there was a reason the Camelot armor was made of plastic. Thank goodness it was, since I wouldn't have had a clue how to repair it if it was made of metal. But at least thanks to my time in the SCA, I knew what all the armor pieces were, and where they were supposed to go, and explained it to the others on the dressing crew and a couple of props people who had the mistaken notion that armor is a prop, not a costume. I never sent Lancelot out on stage dressed incorrectly (Arthur was sent out in a mishmash of clothes one night, without shoes; the props crew had moved them without telling Arthur's dresser and she couldn't find them - so she grabbed some stuff, got him into them, and got him out on stage in the nick of time; he never questioned her about this as the actors with dressers came to rely on us).

I live just a few miles from the actual grave of King Arthur (um, possibly), so the history of Arthurian myth-making is vividly present!

(It’s a short walk from the Isle of Avalon, but Camelot’s a bit of a way down the A303 and hasn’t aged well.)

Some of the Merlin fanfic stories I've read say that Camelot just wore away over the centuries, partly due to being plundered for the stone to make other buildings, and partly due to the normal ravages of time when there's nobody around to keep it repaired. Others say that Merlin enchanted it and hid it away so it's been kept in shape for when Arthur returns.

There's a story in which Merlin owns a place near the Isle of Avalon and the town there is basically a tourist attraction for Arthurian afficionados. It's just after the annual festival when Arthur finally turns up, having crawled out of the Lake, and finds himself in a coffee shop where he can't understand anything being said around him or to him (they take him as one of the role-players who maybe didn't realize that the festival just ended).

When Arthur speaks to them, it's not in modern English. It's in Brittonic. I applaud the author for showing the readers that it doesn't make sense for Arthur and the knights (the other knights aren't in this particular story) to come back and immediately understand modern English, including idioms.

I know there are lots of anachronisms in Merlin. There are some I shake my head over, others I'll mock (like Morgana's dress). I've even noticed that every adult male in Camelot, including those just visiting, wear the exact same color and style of trousers. That's probably a costume budget decision, but it stands out to those of us who notice such things. Gwaine first appears in Season 3, episode 4. He leaves at the end of that episode, having been banished by Uther. All through that episode, he's wearing the same color and style of trousers that the Camelot knights wear. In the context of the story, it makes no sense at all. He then turns up in the 8th episode of that season (leaves again because he's still banished), and is knighted in the 13th episode (a two-parter involving the Cup of Life and trying to get Morgana off the throne; Arthur decides to knight several commoner men - and never knows that Gwaine is actually not a commoner). Some fans have said the Cup of Life is the show's take on the Holy Grail.

Since Merlin is immortal and is supposed to have waited 1500 years+ for Arthur's return, it's obvious that the show is meant to take place in the 6th century. But there are so many anachronistic elements that you pretty much have to say, "Okay, this is alt-history where tomatoes somehow made it to Britain centuries before they actually did and people can get thrown across the room and into trees and never have to worry about concussion."

That said... now that I've read more about this period of history (ended up on Wikipedia, searching out names for a story I'm writing that takes place in 11th-century Britain, and went down a rabbit hole of links and ended up reading about the 7th century or thereabouts), it would be interesting to see the actual sites where the stories are said to have happened.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, the bit about Glastonbury being a tourist attraction for Arthur aficionados is true at least! Although I still love it there, for many reasons.

My favourite bit is that the signs on the top of Glastonbury Tor refer to it as the Isle of Avalon as if that’s a historical fact. And the sign telling you what all the features on the horizon are includes Cadbury Castle in the distance and then puts “(Camelot)” after its name as if that’s a historical fact, too. Glastonbury has been inventing Arthurian associations since at least 1191, which is when the remains of Arthur and Guinevere were “discovered” in the grounds of the abbey, so it’s a money-making tradition with a long and possibly noble history.

The Glastonbury Festival doesn’t actually happen in Glastonbury, by the way - it’s far too massive - and in fact Glastonbury itself is quieter than usual during the festival. The festival-goers don’t generally go to the town. The two really don’t have much to do with each other apart from the name, but I think it’s a shame that the festival is so famous and such a fixture on the national calendar that it overshadows Glastonbury itself, as it’s such an interesting place.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Historical and quasi-historical/legendary history is a moneymaking thing. We don't really have much here that's old enough to attract people other than places like Heritage Park in Calgary, or Barkerville in BC. That only goes back to the 1800s, though.

There's a huge jump between the paleontology museum in Drumheller (fossils dating back tens to hundreds of millions of years) vs museums/living history parks that only date back a couple of hundred years at most. The only things earlier in this part of the country are sites dealing with the fur trade and various explorers.

 

[CaffeineJunkie]

300 and Pocahontas should be excluded from this list. "Misleading" implies that the filmmakers expected the audience to mistake the movie for being historically accurate. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature can tell that this is not the case with either of those movies. Complaining about historical inaccuracies in them is like complaining about the historical inaccuracy of the ending of Inglorious Bastards.

Pocahontas features a talking willow tree. A TALKING. TREE. And Pocahontas learns how to speak English in about 5 seconds by believing in the power of friendship or painting with the colors of the wind or something equally moronic. Is there a single person in the world who would watch that and think "yes, this seems like something that could have historically happened"? Of course not.

300 likewise makes no secret of the fact that it's as much fantasy as history. Persian devices that are obviously some kind of gunpowder-based grenade are referred to as magic or sorcery (I forget which). Animals whose real-life sizes are well-known to the general public are depicted as being much bigger in the movie than in real life. There's at least one Persian guy who looks more like an alien that you'd fight in Doom or Duke Nukem than someone who might have historically existed. And as Honest Trailers pointed out, Xerxes's voice sounds like he's in the witness protection program. There can't be more than a half-dozen people in the world who watched any of this and mistook it for an attempt to portray history accurately.

An honorable mention belongs to Anastasia, a movie where Rasputin was a zombie wizard who kept a talking bat as a pet/sidekick. Nobody who watches that movie thinks that it has anything to do with real history other than "the Russian royal family died in a revolution of some kind" and "Saint Petersburg is a city in Russia". Yet this didn't stop critics from whining about historical inaccuracies.

Furthermore, I'd like to point out that literally every word of this...

Blackhawk Down paints an intensely romantic picture of high-intensity combat: Soldiers in a brotherhood of arms, a sweeping musical score for every fallen comrade, and a battlefield that one can imagine navigating while picking off enemy fighters if only they were a bit more fit. Throw in some simplistic stereotypes of Somali warlords and heavy doses of American patriotism with slow-motion shots of the American flag flapping in the wind, and a bunch of very "cool" looking commandos, and one could easily leave this film not thinking that war is horrible, but that being surrounded by hundreds of armed Somalis in the Battle Mogadishu was fun.

...is wrong. BHD pushed literally the exact opposite agenda: "War is hell" and "Why are Americans being sent to die in this random BS on the other side of the planet that has nothing to do with us?"

Finally...

Critics praised The Imitation Game, but it was still called out for its various inaccuracies. For instance, the film suggests Turig invented and built the machine that broke the German Enigma code, which isn't true. There was a machine that Polish cryptologists had already built before Turig began working for the British government.

That's nothing compared to the historical inaccuracies in how it depicted Turing himself, and especially his "suicide". For starters, while the movie doesn't use the A-word, it very obviously depicts him as having Asperger's, or some Hollywood version of Asperger's. In reality, there's no evidence that he had any form of ASD or any of the symptoms depicted in the movie. The movie also conveniently glosses over the facts that (a) he didn't mind the effects of depo provera beyond growing a pair of man-tits, (b) he had been TAKEN OFF of depo provera about a YEAR before his death, and (c) British cops are crap and did a crap lousy investigation into his death, which we now know was probably accidental. Also, tremors are not a side effect of depo provera.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

^You need to fix your quote tags.

 

[Patine]

Adding a few here:

Cromwell (the one that had Alec Guiness as Charles I) is a biopic of Oliver the Pure and the English Civil Wars that the Wikipedia article does a job job at pointing out the historical inaccuracies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell_(film)#Historical_accuracy

The Passion of the Christ - this just seemed designed to offend both Jews AND Christians, just in different ways.

The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty - Pure Bushist war propaganda as though to justify the war cimes, illegal invasions, and crimes against humanity (like torture) and the U.S. Constitituonal guarantees by the Bush Administration and carried on faithfully by the Obama Administration by dressing it up in exciting, explosive Michael Bay-style visuals and narratives.

The movie is indeed blatant propaganda, just not a Russian one.
Book is far more accurate and impartial, though far from flawless too.

The Modern Russian Federation and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, were not the same nation, do not have the same Government or values (even if Gennady Zhugenov wants to change that - he's as powerlessly in opposion as Alexei Nivesky's allies), and do not necessarily benefit from the same sort of propaganda, despite disingenous and distorted attempts by Putin.

300 is deeply, deeply fascist. The film's portrayal of good guys and bad guys is the opposite of historical reality; think of Sparta as the Taliban but with more child-rape while Persia was, relatively speaking, like an America run by Bernie Sanders.

Birth of a Nation is another obvious candidate, with good guys and bad guys reversed so that the terrorists in the Klan are portrayed as noble freedom fighters.

Okay, maybe like the Third Reich and Pol Pot were worse.

Comparing Ancient and Medival Cultures, Societies, and Nations ideologically directly against Modern Nations and Socio-Political systems is utterly unworkable, unless only specific actions, policies, or crimes that are rationally comparable enough to be so compared directly and individually. Otherwise, it leads to shameful, hyperbolic screeds meant to appeal to the modern zeitgeist, but having no real value in any meaningful way.

 

[CaffeineJunkie]

300 is deeply, deeply fascist.

The people who say this understand neither 300 nor fascism. The comic graphic novel was written by a libertarian, and Zack Snyder doesn't seem political at all.

 

[Patine]

The people who say this understand neither 300 nor fascism. The comic graphic novel was written by a libertarian, and Zack Snyder doesn't seem political at all.

My comment just above on such direct, but purely semantic and unproductive and completely inaccurate comparisons, by nature, definitely still applies here, and I do agree with you, as well.

I'm all for self-determination and yay Athens for winning the battle of Marathon, but I will die on the hill of Sparta being basically the worst society in human history. Also credit to Thebes for the strategy of helot liberation

Keep in mind, also, that Sparta was the Greek City-State that far more of our knowledge of it is based on hostile records of their enemies, than their own writings, as, other than very pragmatic records and measures and Laconic Poetry, Sparta's opus of writing and records, themselves, is VERY sparse. I'm not, at all, claiming to know any secret, redeeming facts about Sparta, but just pointing out that the elements you jump on are, mostly, hostile propaganda (like the Romans believing, and writing, that ALL of their enemies practiced human sacrifice, when only a very few show any archaeological evidence of it). Though horrid things were certainly done in Ancient Laconia, one should avoid speaking from tropes, alone, so quickly.

 

[Lexicus]

The people who say this understand neither 300 nor fascism. The comic graphic novel was written by a libertarian, and Zack Snyder doesn't seem political at all.

Well, first of all, the politics of the authors don't concern my argument because I would argue that the text of the film itself is fascist.

Second of all, yes, American right-libertarians like Frank Miller are virtually all cryptofascists so you've helped prove my point

 

[Patine]

Well, first of all, the politics of the authors don't concern my argument because I would argue that the text of the film itself is fascist.

Second of all, yes, American right-libertarians like Frank Miller are virtually all cryptofascists so you've helped prove my point

But, the semantic, hyperbolic, highly inaccurate, and zeitgeist-driven, but useless for meaningful discourse, bad and toxic habit today of conflating nations and belief systems in highly incompatible and temporally separate and unrelated mileius as being one in the same, remains. So much of modern rhetoric is Social Progressives saying EVERYONE they critiicize, disagree with, and don't like is a, "Fascist," or a, "Nazi," and Modern Revisionist Social Conservative-Nationalists saying EVERYONE they critiicize, disagree with, and don't like is a, "Socialist," or a, "Communist," to the degree that one has to wonder if these words hold any appropriate impact or value anymore, or those spewing them truly understand what they really mean and properly refer to.

 

[CaffeineJunkie]

right-libertarians like Frank Miller are virtually all cryptofascists

People who say this understand neither libertarians nor fascists. Try advocating libertarian ideas on the Storm Front forums and see how long it takes you to get banned.

 

[Patine]

People who say this understand neither libertarians nor fascists. Try advocating libertarian ideas on the Storm Front forums and see how long it takes you to get banned.

Of course, I understand fully the difference between Libertarianism, Fascism, Communism, and Theocracy, and I am opposed to all four - but I fully know the difference between them clearly. Many today just glom together all ideologies they don't like - and all who follow or adhere to them, or, "might as well be declared to do so," by semantic branding and witch-hunting tactics - as all being one in the same - as I said, usually, "Fascism," by Social Progressives, and, "Communism," by Modern Revisionist Social Conservative-Nationalists. It's essentially a tactic McCarthy and Tito, from opposite terminological standpoints, used in their respective nations in the '50's with ruthless and abusive impunity.

 

[Lexicus]

People who say this understand neither libertarians nor fascists. Try advocating libertarian ideas on the Storm Front forums and see how long it takes you to get banned.

Try making an actual argument instead of just saying I don't understand. Meanwhile I know that you won't get banned from Stormfront (that's one word) for saying the Civil Rights Act is Unconstitutional or for saying there should be no age of consent.

 

[Patine]

Try making an actual argument instead of just saying I don't understand.

Calling people, "Fascists," or, "Nazis," (or, on the other, "side," "Socialists," or, "Communists,") as a form of generic socio-poliitcal name-calling, or to concemn them for disagreeing with one's views, is not an argument, either, despite being a popular decoy for one in the modern zeitgeist.

 

[CaffeineJunkie]

Try making an actual argument instead of just saying I don't understand. Meanwhile I know that you won't get banned from Stormfront (that's one word) for saying the Civil Rights Act is Unconstitutional or for saying there should be no age of consent.

Try making an actual argument instead of calling everything you don't like fascist and conflating two ideologies that have nothing in common and are polar opposites of each other.

I'd also love to see you provide evidence for the age of consent claim. Go ahead. Do it.

 

[Lexicus]

Keep in mind, also, that Sparta was the Greek City-State that far more of our knowledge of it is based on hostile records of their enemies, than their own writings, as, other than very pragmatic records and measures and Laconic Poetry, Sparta's opus of writing and records, themselves, is VERY sparse. I'm not, at all, claiming to know any secret, redeeming facts about Sparta, but just pointing out that the elements you jump on are, mostly, hostile propaganda (like the Romans believing, and writing, that ALL of their enemies practiced human sacrifice, when only a very few show any archaeological evidence of it). Though horrid things were certainly done in Ancient Laconia, one should avoid speaking from tropes, alone, so quickly.

Ahh, Patine. Two points here. One, it is not true that most of our writings on Sparta were authored by Sparta's enemies. In fact, the key sources on Sparta were written by Athenian aristocrats who were broadly pro-Spartan ("Laconophiles"): Xenophon and Thucydides.

Moreover, the fact that Spartan written sources are so sparse tells us something about Sparta all by itself.