Fiction in history movies?

Question

Does it matter that much of the public gets their information from movies that use history as the backdrop to the plot but yet create events and depict characters that are not factual?

Answer 1

Apparently many people don't care about historical accuracy otherwise Titanic wouldn't have been such a big hit.

Answer 2

Does it matter to whom? To Hollywood? No, they're trying to make history interesting. Does it matter to thousands of historians? Of course it does because they have taken the time to study what has been documented. But the history that's been recorded is usually a one-sided tale. To the victors of war go the spoils, which includes their version of how things went.

Besides, there his historical fiction where you set fictional characters within a historical event, like the movie Titanic which has been mentioned. We know all that happened and the story of the movie is just a story that could be set in any other historical setting.

Answer 3

Even those supposed to be based on real historical figures are stretched. Yesterday I just read on Yahoo about the top 11 historically inaccurate movies. Three of them had Mel Gibson in them. Apocalypto, Braveheart and The Patriot. But still it does seem better that how we learn history in classrooms.

Answer 4

All movies do that.  A movie set in the modern day is still using this era as a backdrop, and they are not always very accurate about it, either.  As long as they don't claim to be a documentary, I don't have a problem with it.  Those which claim to strive for some level of historical accuracy should be held to a higher standard, in my opinion.  Just as an example, the producers of the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" went out of their way to point out that the Smithsonian had worked with them.  They got the equipment and the costuming right, thanks to the Smithsonian, but the rest was pretty poor history, and I was a bit upset with the movie.  Again, had they not claimed some level of historical authenticity, I would not have had the same issue.

Answer 5

I have a master's degree in History. I sometimes find it both amusing and frighting how much historical inaccuracies occurs in the movies. I remember one epic movie back in the 1950s that depicted both Nero and Cleopatra together. The only problem was that Cleo died several hundred years before Nero was born.

If you are looking for accurate historical information, I do not recommend watching a movie.

Answer 6

On the one hand, you will hear philistines say that 'history is mostly just made up by the historians anyway', and on the other, you will hear historians being 'amused' with the foolishness of the philistines.

What gets lost in the noise of these two groups insulting and talking past each other, is the fact that there is such a thing as historical truth -- and historial truth does matter.

To a greater or lesser degree, all film and television makes an effort to be taken seriously (even ironic comedy wants to be taken seriously, as ironic comedy). It also accepts that entertainment implies the sacrifice of the messiness of real life.

Furthermore, like science fiction, historical fiction is primarily about the present -- finding ways to comment on what is going on now.

These are the main problems -- the attempt to build a serious, entertaining narrative can be confused with an attempt to present 'the truth' about history; and commentary on the present in the form of the past gets confused with 'the truth', too.

The cardinal rule is this: if there are people trying to play historical people in a movie, it is a drama, and has only a tangential relationship with the truth.

Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. This is an historical truth.

But he didn't hop into a phone booth with Bill and Ted.

Answer 7

it depends. if a person watches a  movie based on  historical fact and uses it as a history leson,  that would bother me. just because a person saw the movie, "we were soldiers" doesn't mean he/she can factually discuss the battle for the il drang valley. if a person saw the movie, and were so inspired by it, they researched the battle in detail, that would be a good thing.

Answer 8

Much of history isn't factual anyway.