10. The Hurt Locker
Universal StudiosKatheryn Bigelow's hugely overrated Oscar winning war movie The Hurt Locker follows a bomb disposal team in Iraq as they struggle to keep on top of all the Improvised Explosive Devices being set by the Iraqi insurgency. Jeremy Renner stars as William James, a man who's maverick tendencies lead to escalating tensions within his unit. Based on the writings of Mark Boal, a freelance writer who had spent time embedded with troops in Iraq and who also wrote the screenplay, The Hurt Locker faced considerable criticism at the time of its release for its less than accurate accounting of the war and the process involved. Iraq veteran Kate Holt described it as, "Hollywood's version of the Iraq war and of the soldiers who fight it, and their version is inaccurate." From minor details such as equipment and uniforms to the behaviour of the soldiers, veterans were not impressed by claims for realism, while a journalist working for Military Times said, "Some of the scenes are so disconnected with reality to be almost parody." Still, these inaccuracies didn't prevent the film from being a success, and Bigelow would go on to make another film which played loose with the facts, Zero Dark Thirty, which many keen-eyed observers considered to be little more than a pro-torture CIA propaganda movie. Given that the CIA advised throughout the production, perhaps this wasn't such a wild claim.