15 Major Historical Inaccuracies That Undermine Famous Movies
Don't believe everything you hear.
Since the dawn of cinema, movies have looked to history to provide inspiration for their stories. Historical stories are always fascinating to see but, understandably, no movie can ever fully replicate the truth. As a result, deviations from historical fact are inevitable, but there are still many unnecessary inaccuracies in movies which really undermine the film as a whole.
Whether to cut time, make the subjects more sympathetic or even just to add excitement to the film, 'historical' movies do play around with history a lot A large amount of this is probably motivated by sanitizing the films in order to seem more Oscar-friendly, since historical dramas are a big Oscar staple. This is a screen-writing practice that needs to die.
Artistic licence can work, but more often than not people will watch and enjoy a film claiming to be based on reality, only to have the film ruined once they do some fact-checking. With true story movies, the factual part is often the film's hook and main draw; if this hook is messed with, it seriously hurts the film's credibility, as is the case with these following movies. They're largely worth watching, but don't use them for fact-checking...
15. Darkest Hour's Tube Scene Is Completely Untrue
For the most part, this solid Oscar-Bait historical drama, which focuses on Winston Churchill (a brilliant, Oscar-winning Gary Oldman) during the early months of World War II, takes a low-key and historically accurate approach to things, but there is one scene towards the end which is completely made-up. Director Joe Wright has admitted this and most viewers probably realized this as soon as the scene happened.
Near the end, Churchill gets onto the Tube, hears the views of the general public and finds that they are against peace with Germany. These conversations inspire his legendary "We will never surrender!" speech. The speech itself is a good final scene, but this tube sequence was a major misstep.
This clearly fictional inclusion takes the viewer right out of the film, while this scene also isn't particularly well-written and adds very little. Some bits of artistic license have a justified purpose; for example, in Schindler's List the Auschwitz scene is made up but takes the viewers to the most infamous Holocaust location and shows them some more of the horrors of the Holocaust, so that deviation worked. This, on the other hand, was not a good idea.
It also undermines Winston Churchill himself. He did not piece together his incredible speeches based on random people he met; rather his words came from him alone. This inaccurate representation is disappointing given that Darkest Hour is an often effective representation of Churchill and the rare cultural depiction that bothers to show his darker side.