Should Historical Films be Accurately Portrayed?

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As a history buff I find the "stylised" portrayal of history in Hollywood to be really frustrating. Nearly every important historic event made into film has deviated in some way in terms of historic accuracy.

My question is can historic films permit artistic licence, creativity and fiction with the intent to entertain audiences? are there risks of changing history to accommodate a visual format and stylised storyline?

When I hear a film is historic, there are films based on something or someone historical, and there are films inspired by something or someone. There is undoubtedly films that are a mixture of both.

I initially started comparing two biographic films from 1957, The Buster Keaton Story (fair amount of fabrication), and Man of a Thousand Faces (not 100% accurate, but fewer fabrications). I was not comfortable with the amount of space it was going to take.

Going back to the first two sentences of this post, I looked up examples of most inaccurate and most accurate biopics. What I found interesting was The Imitation Game appeared on both. The film Lincoln did as well. Rush, the film about Niki Lauda and James Hunt, Selma, The Big Short, and Downfall were all rated as accurate. The King's Speech, Bohemian Rhapsody, and The Social Network were all inaccurate, to made up. Amadeus is sited as and inaccurate film. There are many more articles centered around Worst and Bad than Accurate and Good. I find that interesting.

Anymore, when I see the words "based on the true story," I read that as "okay, the gist of the story is there." After watching The Aviator, one of my many favorite films, I read several books about Howard Hughes and realized the film took many events and eras of his life and jumbled them up and edited them back together. It shows up in the inaccurate lists as well.

cyberdora, of the historic films you've seen, can you recall which were more accurate?

Yes, a few come to mind.
1. King Arthur (2004) directed by Antoine Fuqua
Ironically this movie is considered historically inaccurate as its an interpretation of the original King Arthur Story. But what critics don't realise is that King Arthur is already a romanticised medieval fiction reflecting popular romance of medieval Britain about brave Knights and kingdoms.

what Fuqua did was go back to the original Welsh source of the legend around the time Roman garrisons were leaving Britain approx 400AD. Fuqua attempted to recreate Britain of the time.
- Romanised and Christian Celtic kingdoms
- tattooed Pagan Picts
- Saxon warbands
- former Roman cavalry given land who were drawn from tribes subdued on continental Europe.
whole story was plausible from a historical perspective

2. Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" - absolute masterpiece, the level of accuracy capturing Aztec MesoAmerica on the cusp of Spanish discovery. Highlights are costumes, sets and cast speaking Mayan gave the movie such an authentic experience.

3. Vikings (tv series 2013-2020). Michael Hirst went to huge trouble to capture Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon Britain around 800AD. It could only have been better if the cast spoke all their dialogue in Old English and old Scandinavian. But I appreciate key points like when the Lindisfarne monk Aethelstan spoke in Old English as he warned of coming Viking raids on a dark and stormy night capturing foreboding the monks felt prior to Viking raids.

In my opinion:

Accurate:

Lincoln

12 Years A Slave

Ray

Walk the Line

Ford VS Ferrari

Rush

The Darkest Hour

Schindler's List

Milk

Capote

Selma

Apollo 13

Oppenheimer

Frost/Nixon

The Disaster Artist

Elvis

Inaccurate:

Alexander by Oliver Stone

Braveheart

The Blind Side

King Arthur

Both:

The King's Speech

The Social Network

Apocalypto

Ed Wood

Foxcatcher

The Big Short

Amadeus

PS: Over the years since the release of Alexander, rumors still persist that Baz Lurhmann still wants to make his own biopic about Alexander the Great with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, but if true, how could it still work?

King Arthur was marketed as historically accurate, but was utter dogshit. They turned the Saxons into Nazis and the costuming and choice of weapons was all off, for two examples of it's shortcomings.

Incredibly inaccurate:
Patch Adams.

One movie I like is Oliver Stone's movie Nixon, which came out in 1995. It got flack for not being accurate, but it wasn't trying to be. It was pure speculation " what if?" or " this could have happened". So depending on a director or writer, you're going to get a slightly different result if you're doing something historical.

Oh that bit was weird?

Good Morning Vietnam IMO will always be one of the best comedy films ever made, but it's interesting that it almost got a sequel called Good Morning Chicago and that its subject, radio host Adrian Cronauer claimed that Good Morning Vietnam got a lot wrong about him.

As a matter of fact, I would love to see a biopic about Robin Williams get made someday, maybe covering just the early days of his career?

Charlie Wilson's war describes the US involvement in getting the Russians out of Afghanistan.
It glosses over the complex politics of the region. Is it possible to teach most Americans something that complicated?

I'm afraid the generation that remembered the Russian invasion of Afghanistan were informed by the Rambo movies. In that movie the US sent Sylvester Stallone as a one man special forces to help the "good guys" (Afghan Mujahadeen) defeat the "bad" Ruskis. Of course we now know America used a certain paid operative by the name of Osama Bin Laden to train and arm what would become the Taliban.

Yeah. It was basically nothing more than an attempt at showing the Saxons were the irredeemable bad guys. It might work narratively, but it's dogshit history and projects a mindset that simply didn't exist in period.

It may have worked
https://www.yahoo.com/news/university-c ... 03168.html

That's just a news story about the preferred nomenclature shifting in academic settings, largely because of white nationalist types hijacking the term Anglo-Saxon.

I doubt the movie's depiction of the English as bad Nazi caricatures played a significant role though. English white supremacists were fixated on ideas of Germanic superiority over Celts long before that movie came out (back to Victorian times), but not all the way back to before the Heptarchy.

One of the main things we've learned since Victorian times is that Britons largely assimilated into the new culture, rather than being genetically replaced by settlers from the continent.

Yeah I think the one crucial scene where leader of the "blonde" Saxon war band forbade one of his kinsmen from lying with a very attractive red headed Celtic maiden because any child sired by the Saxons would weaken their bloodline (so choosing to slay her instead) was clearly BS. Not sure what was going through the script writers heads?

All of the northern German tribes who conquered Europe (Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Norse) barely survived one generation before being assimilated by their vanquished subjects. Classic example is the Viking Rollo and his men who after conquering Normandy immediately became a Christian and spoke French .

I think Britain does pose one interesting conundrum which is the imposition of English and erasure of Celtic languages but that didn't stop wodin/thor being replaced by Jesus and their Germanic bloodlines largely British (yes I know there's a revival in promoting "Englishness" from the likes of Nigel Farage and tommy Robinson but the fact is the Anglo-Saxons were just one group who left their mark on the British Isles).

Infact this illiterate, flea infested, unwashed nomadic pagan tribe plunged Britain in 500 years of dark ages. Hardly a noble bloodline

Britain couldn't have been doing so well before the Saxons were invited by Vortigern to serve as foederati, if the natives viewed the pagan barbarians as enough of a prestige culture to assimilate into them, rather than trying to assimilate them or violently resist them.

The Romano-Britons must have figured it was safer to be subjects of the Saxons than to be victims of them, the Picts and the Scoti (largely from Ireland at the time).

I think part of the reason people and popular legend envisions the Saxon takeover of southern Britain as much more violent than it appears to have been is largely because the Christians who wrote those tales struggled to believe that the earlier Christians would choose to abandon the church for pagan gods. Christianity was reintroduced a few generations later, and was much more inline with continental Christianity, rather that the Celtic church that was dominant prior to this.

So basically, the opposite of what happened to the other Germanic hordes appears to have happened in Britain. The Saxons assimilated the locals, rather than being assimilated by them. Only small pockets of Celtic languages (and no Vulgar Latin) remained in their wake.