Thread: Looking for Best Historically Accurate movies

There are tons of history movies. Reading through a lot of reviews about many of them, they just aren't accurate. Who in Hollywood has mad a historically accurate movie. I read that Tora! Tora! Tora! is accurate. I read that Thirteen Days is close. I've read that J Edgar, Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, and Nixon are filled with inaccuracies.

A lot of them are embellished a little for entertainment purposes.

"Khartoum" is really solid for the most part. I can watch that any number of times, and I've lost count of how many times I've seen it already. "The Patriot" and "Braveheart", whatever their other merits, are not. "Tora Tora Tora" is superb as well. For WW2 flicks "the Longest Day" is good, "A Bridge too Far" is really good. "Gettysburg" follows Michael Shaara's "Killer Angels" faithfully, and Shaara was excellent on his history.

Mel Gibson flicks seem to follow historically pretty well from the limited fact checking I've done. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of my favorite flicks though.

Kingdom of Heaven i think was pretty accurate

Speaking of Mel Gibson, have you seen "We Were Soldiers" db? One of my favorites. It was based off the book "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" based off of actual events by two men, a Lieutenant and a reporter, who were at the Battle of La Drang during the Vietnam War. I'd recommend it if you haven't seen it already.

Pocahontas is great.

Truth of the matter is that history is hard to distill into 90-150 minutes and remain entertaining and uncomplicated without blurring the facts some. I don't mind as long as it is not used to pump liberal propaganda into the film.

For example, in "Glory Road", the Texas Western basketball team returns to their hotel rooms to find racial epithets smeared in blood on the walls of their rooms. Earlier, a black player is beaten in the restroom just for being black. When the REAL Texas Western players were asked if any of that ever happened to them they said "nah, man. They (the scriptwriters) just made that up." And WHY did they make that up and put it in the film? For drama and outrage, certainly, but also to convince generations of black people who watch the film that this really happened.

Similarly in "The Express: The Ernie Davis Story", the Syracuse football team encounters a viciously racist crowd when they play at West Virginia. Did this really happen? No. The dramatics supposedly happened, according to the screenwriters, when the Orangemen played at the University of North Carolina - until some fact-checker noted that Syracuse did not play North Carolina during Davis' years there. So, rather than deleting this incident, they just switched the scene to West Virginia in order to impugn a whole other fan base. WHY does this get included in the film? No doubt to convince generations of blacks that this actually happened.

Of course, there were racists in the 50s and 60s and of course there were ugly things done to black people back then. There's no denying this. But adding them into screenplays in exaggerated and violent ways, IMO, is strictly exploitive and design to foment racial hatred used to excuse reverse racism today by Obama and the Justice Department as well as justify violence performed by blacks today. They SAW outrageous racist behavior in allegedly true stories so it MUST have truly happened. Only it didn't. Not to Texas Western and not to Syracuse.

Jesus, JoelHoof.

Originally Posted by Skinny

Speaking of Mel Gibson, have you seen "We Were Soldiers" db? One of my favorites. It was based off the book "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" based off of actual events by two men, a Lieutenant and a reporter, who were at the Battle of La Drang during the Vietnam War. I'd recommend it if you haven't seen it already.

The beginning of that movie was filmed at Lawson Army Air Field at Ft Benning, GA. Been there a couple times. Seen the hangars and all in person. Pretty awesome.

JFK was accurate.

:wink:

Originally Posted by SeeingRed

The beginning of that movie was filmed at Lawson Army Air Field at Ft Benning, GA. Been there a couple times. Seen the hangars and all in person. Pretty awesome.

I didn't know that.

I've been too Benning a couple of times to do demos (help and cook up some free food samples for companies) at the commissary there so i've only seen a little of it. I'd love to take of tour of that base, it looks huge and has a lot of history from what i'ver heard. I'm a war buff, though i don't know a lot of the facts, just fascinated with the history of it. There's a Revolutionary War Museum here that i could spend hours in. It also has a lot of other things from past wars like WWI, WWII, Korean, Etc... in it as well.

Sorry to get of course....

Spartacus on Starz. It's not a movie it's a TV show but for the most part follows history or at least what i've read up on it.

Clockwork Orange was a surprisingly accurate portrayal of today's fine city of Chicago.

Deliverance is an accurate representation of southern culture.