1. Pearl Harbour, The Gold Standard Of Total Nonsense
Buena Vista PicturesA love story for the ages with some planes and stuff blowing up in the background, Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour smashed box office records when it came out in 2001. The clean-cut, naive Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) sign up for the air force, with Rafe falling for a nurse named Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) that he met in his medical exam. Tragedy strikes, however, when he gets shot down over the English Channel and presumed dead. Sad face. Anyway, Evelyn and Danny both get over it by hooking up, which gets a bit awkward when Rafe turns up alive and well, having been rescued by a French shipping vessel. The messy love triangle plays out over a grossly inflated 183 minutes. And then the whole Japanese kamikaze attack happens, just to polish things off.
What really happened: It's perhaps unfair to ask Michael Bay, the director who made a film about Bruce Willis exploding an asteroid and put together Megan Fox and Shia Labeouf as a viable screen couple, to couch his movies in reality at all. Reality doesn't have nearly enough explosions of shaky cams. But when it comes to a huge, historical and well-known event as Pearl Harbour, where thousands died and America's entry into World War II was confirmed, you should maybe be a little more respectful to the real people who were involved. Then again, we repeat: reality doesn't have nearly enough explosions of shaky cams. There's so much fiction in Pearl Harbour, in fact, that the National Geographic Channel managed to get a feature-length documentary out of refuting parts of the film and filling in details that it neglected to include. Tons of living survivors of the attacks were pretty peeved that the events had been totally Hollywood-ised, unsurprisingly, with on expert opining that the movie "fails to provide even a reasonable facsimile of history". Almost all of the real-life figures included in Pearl Harbour were grossly misrepresented, and they even took a famous quote from a Japanese general that he never actually said. Except of course in the film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which also told the story of the attacks. Along with that, there's so many details regarding military equipment, planes and social mores that the movie gets wrong as to
inspire a huge piece in a Naval History Magazine. All the changes for dramatic license stretched credulity, like Admiral Kimmel being on a golf course when his fleet was attacked (he wasn't), or Affleck's character joining the RAF (which...Americans don't do). They also showed the Japanese deliberately destroying hospitals and medical centres, which they didn't do, because whilst they did fly their planes directly into boats they weren't total jerks. Then there's the anachronisms, which you need a whole other feature-length documentary or 5000-word essay to properly document. People smoking cigarettes that didn't enter production until the seventies, glasses that hadn't been invented being worn, even a bit where ticker-tape messages are printed out in Helvetica, a font not introduced until 1957. We're not gonna sum up everything that Pearl Harbour totally invented, twisted, or just plain got wrong about the true story of what happened on December 7, 1941. There is way, way too much.