10 Most Historically Inaccurate War Movies Ever Made
Turns out the Bridge on the River Kwai isn't that accurate...
"Based on a true story": five words that will change your outlook on any film. Read this in the opening credits and the whole time you’ll probably be thinking "wow, all of this really happened... Isn’t history amazing?" And this is exactly the director’s intention. But don’t be fooled, because those words often need to be taken with entire buckets worth of salt…
However, basing a film on true events and then proceeding to take liberties with the truth is basically essential if you want to generate any box-office success, and it isn’t exactly a crime. You see, the key words here are "based on". It’s like saying you’re on a plant-based diet but still eat meat every now and then. Strictly speaking, it’s not really breaking the rules.
Despite this room for discretion, there are films that go way, WAY overboard with the amount of meat they eat, to a point where it would be a miscarriage of justice to say that they were based on a true story.
Here are 10 war films that were, at a push, ‘inspired by true events’…
10. The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
You may have never heard of this film, but you will know one of its star actors: Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).
Winning 7 Academy Awards, this film tells the true-ish story of British Prisoners of War who arrive at a Japanese prison camp in Burma in early 1943, while the War of the Pacific between the Japanese Empire and the United States is still raging. These prisoners are ordered to construct a bridge over the River Kwai in order to connect Bangkok and Rangoon and further the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway, something they initially object to as manual labour is prohibited under the Geneva Convention.
Indeed, many inaccuracies and fictions have been pointed out by eyewitnesses to the construction of the real railway, as well as historians. This includes the way in which the film severely underplayed the horrific conditions to which the prisoners were subjected to in building this bridge. In reality, approximately 13,000 POWs died whilst working on it along with a further 100,000 civilians. Furthermore, whilst some names of the characters were real, their personalities and the plot of the film bear little resemblance to reality.
Ultimately, the novel this film is based on was meant to be a blend of fact and fiction in an attempt to portray the pointlessness of war. However, it cannot go unsaid that in doing so it sacrificed the ‘fact’ element rather extensively, thereby distorting the historical construction of the notorious Death Railway.