Traditionally Inaccurate Films that Received the Historical past All Flawed
There’s a famous quote that someone very wise once wrote: “Calculating the number of historical movies that got history wrong is easy. It’s all of them.”
While funny, the sentiment also contains a grain of truth: no movie can remain one hundred percent true to the facts. Even greats of the genre like Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln or Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York take liberties, streamlining certain events, conflating others, or simply leaving stuff out altogether.
Many movies, though, take entirely too much. Those historically inaccurate movies make up the bulk of the list below. A lack of historical accuracy doesn’t always make for a bad movie; far from it. That said, there’s a big difference between fudging a few dates and sugarcoating slavery. Certain instances call for condemnation.
Braveheart (1995)
Listing of all Braveheart’s historical inaccuracies would take a while. So, let’s get going.
William Wallace was not a lowly farmer but a minor Scots nobleman, and he never went by the honorific title “Braveheart.” However, his rival Robert the Bruce did. That said, Robert the Bruce did not betray Wallace to the English. He didn’t even take up the rebel cause until after Wallace’s death, despite a strong claim to the Scottish throne.
Furthermore, Wallace’s beef with the English had nothing to do with either his wife’s murder or with Jus Primae Noctis (the right of noblemen to sleep with local brides on their wedding night, a practice not supported by any evidence anywhere in the world), but over Edward I’s invasion of Scotland after the death of the Scottish king Alexander III.
But perhaps most egregious: Wallace never had an affair with Edward II’s wife Isabella since she was two years old at the time and didn’t set foot in England until after his execution. There goes the romance subplot.
The white van glimpsed in the background of Wallace’s wife Murran’s funeral is, however, fully authentic. White vans were widely available in Scotland in the mid 1990s. Wallace’s wife, however, was not called Murran.
Gladiator (2000)
Among many historical gaffes (for instance, Emperor Marcus Aurelias did not ban circuses but actively encouraged them to deflect from a rotten economy, and Roman “siege” catapults were never used in open battle), the central fallacy of Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic is that gladiators invariably fought to the death. Their bouts were overseen by a referee most of the time and seldom fatal. Trained gladiators were far too valuable to waste.
The Patriot (2000)
Director Roland Emmerich and writer Robert Rodat’s Revolutionary War pic suggests that slaves happily fought for the Continental Army but were press-ganged into fighting for the British. In reality, both sides courted slaves with the promise of freedom, and slaves often willingly joined the British to escape their Colonial owners.
Absurdly, militia leader Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) employs only freed slaves on his plantation. Had he existed, Martin (a composite of several historical figures, all slave-owners) would never have given up the slaves he’d paid good money for and on whom his prosperity depended. Even if he had, would they have stuck around, Song of the South-style, to work his fields?
The movie implies that slaves colonists treated slaves well and had as much to gain as they did from the overthrow of British rule. Also, the scene in which British redcoats burn townspeople alive in a church never happened. That caused great offense to many by referencing a WWII atrocity in which the SS burned 640 French civilians, most of them women and children, imprisoned in a church to death.
Alexander (2004)
Oliver Stone’s biopic of Macedonian king Alexander the Great attracted stinging criticism on its release. Its myriad crimes against history did not go unnoticed.
Scholars pointed out that Persians in the 3rd century BC would not have spoken Arabic but Persian, and that the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which figures prominently, was built a century after Alexander’s death. Add an assortment of fudgings, anachronisms, over-simplifications, and flat-out falsehoods. A map showing “Greece” extending over modern-day Albania, Bulgaria, and parts of the former Yugoslavia, regions never considered part of Greece even in antiquity, and for a haphazard fact salad.
A group of Greeks found Alexander so offensive, lawyers threatened Stone with legal action.
U-571 (2000)
Intrepid U.S. submariners Matthew McConaughey and John Bon Jovi turn the tide of WWII by capturing an Enigma code machine from a stricken German U-boat.
Just one problem. The British Royal Navy seized the Enigma machine in May 1941, six months before the U.S. entered the war. (The studio later added an end caption acknowledging this to mollify widespread outcry.)
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Suffering from a crippling case of writer’s block, Shakespeare finds the inspiration to write Romeo and Juliet after falling in love with a beautiful young actress.
In fact, Shakespeare pinched the idea of the star-crossed lovers from English writer Arthur Brooke’s 1562 narrative poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Brooke had, in turn, borrowed from a short story by Matteo Bandello, an Italian monk and prolific author. Shakespeare plundered Bandello’s work for three other plays: Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado about Nothing.
Pocahontas (1995)
We’d have an easier time listing the elements that Disney’s Pocahontas got right than the things it got wrong. For a short summary of foibles…
The Powhatan tribe knew the Jamestown settlers before Pocahontas met Captain John Smith. The first Anglo-Powhatan war began in 1609 and lasted until 1614. Pocahontas was no older than 11 when she first met Smith. John Smith left Virginia for England in 1609, two years after meeting Pocahontas.
Although close, Smith & Pocahontas never had a romantic relationship. Evidence suggests Pocahontas looked on Smith more as a father figure. Smith also probably concocted the story of Pocahontas saving him from execution.
For the record, Willow trees can’t talk either.
The movie ends on a bittersweet note, with Pocahontas bidding farewell to Smith as he sails for England, vowing to return one day. Things did not quite work out that way. In 1613, the British seized Pocahontas and held for ransom after relations between the settlers and the Powhatans soured.
Pocahontas married an Englishman named John Rolfe shortly afterward, converted to Christianity, and took the name Rebecca. Later, taken to England, she was paraded before the public as a “noble savage,” a symbol of the “good relations” between colonists and indigenous people (some accounts record the terrible abuse she suffered in England). Homesick, she was due to return to America in 1617 but instead fell ill. Rumor has it someone poisoned her.
Pocahontas died later the same year at 21 and was buried in Gravesend, Kent.
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Starring Raquel Welch as a bikini-clad cave-babe battling stop-motion dinosaurs, lusty tribesmen, and the odd giant turtle, this movie has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most historically inaccurate movies ever. For starters, the bikini was not invented until 1946.
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Despite what Michael Bay’s execrable movie would have audiences believe, Japanese pilots categorically did not fire on civilians during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eyewitness accounts confirm they did everything in their power to avoid it.
Also, Roosevelt rising from his wheelchair at the climax of a rousing speech stretches credibility to breaking point and beyond. FDR would rather have quit cigarettes and martinis than sink to such theatrics.
“I’ve been in a wheelchair about as long as was FDR and I cannot think of a more grotesque abuse of his disability,” wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Chicago Tribune. “FDR would never have said or done anything remotely like this. He never talked about his disability with anyone – his family, his wife, even his mother – let alone did stunts for war counselors and generals.”
The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
Chronicling the deadly love triangle between King Henry VIII, his second wife Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, Justin Chadwick’s highly entertaining movie, based on the bestselling book by Philippa Gregory, plays fast and loose with the facts.
For starters, Mary was not younger than Anne but, according to the most recent scholarship, a year older. Far from a shrinking violet, she’d already got it on with King François I of France before hooking up with Henry, François’s great rival. No evidence exists that Henry fathered either of Mary’s children either.
It’s extremely unlikely, too, that Anne ever married nobleman Henry Percy, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have become Duchess of Northumberland, a title created by Henry’s son, Edward VI. Furthermore, their father Thomas’ scheming to get his daughters into the King’s bed makes no sense since, at the time, royal mistresses were not favored at court.
In 1536, Anne was beheaded for alleged adultery after failing to provide Henry with an heir. Here, at least, the film gets it dead on. As befitting royalty, Anne was spared the vulgar touch of the axe and decapitated with a sword, which must’ve made all the difference.
300 (2007)
True, only around 300 Spartan warriors fought at the Battle of Thermopylae, but they didn’t fight alone. Recently formed alliances with several other Greek states meant they had backup from an army of around 7000 men. Experts remain divided on how many of them had CGI abs.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
Amid a welter of inaccuracies, including Elizabeth preaching religious tolerance while English law provided for the hanging, drawing and quartering of Catholics, Shekhar Kapur’s follow-up to 1998’s far better Elizabeth, asserts that Sir Walter Raleigh played a lead role in defeating the Spanish Armada.
It would’ve been a good trick if he had. Raleigh resided in Ireland in 1588, having fallen out of favor with the queen. Sir Francis Drake led the fireship attack against the Armada.
The scene where Raleigh wows the English court with his novelty vegetables also fails the credibility test. Spanish Conquistadores introduced the potato to Europe in 1570 while Raleigh was in France, busily oppressing Catholics.
Casablanca (1942)
Painstakingly accurate in all other respects (except just maybe Axis officers hanging out at the same bar as a fugitive French Resistance leader), Casablanca invented the all-important letters of transit.
King Arthur (2004)
Although set in AD 467, the film depicts both the official withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, which happened in AD 410, and the arrival of Cerdic of Wessex, which happened in AD 495. It also shows Cerdic invading Britain from the North, whereas he actually invaded from the South.
More importantly, Queen Guinevere has shaved armpits, something that has left Arthurian scholars baffled. History does not record the phenomenon until the 1920s, a millennium-and-a-half after Guinevere died.
They Died with their Boots On (1941)
Casting Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn as General George Armstrong Custer rather gives the game away. Sure enough, this is pure hagiography, completely distorting almost every detail of Custer’s life.
That includes his leading the fateful 1874 expedition in search of gold in the Black Hills (in the movie, he argues against it) and, naturally, his lack of judgment and thirst for the glory that led directly to the Little Bighorn massacre. True, Custer died with his boots on that day (although he was among the first to fall, not the last). Then again, so did over 250 of his men, victims of both the Lakota Sioux and their commanding officer’s hubris.
The Norseman (1978)
Nothing but nothing gets the leather-elbow-patch brigade into a froth like horns on a Viking helmet. The movie has plenty of other fallacies to get excited about here – longships with oars, Roman-style sculpted breastplates, Lee Major’s fastidiously-trimmed pornstache. But seriously, the horned helmets really get them going.
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1930s)
“The world is indebted to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria of Great Britain, for perpetuating in an epic poem one of the most distinguished events in history conspicuous for sheer valor…” So reads the pre-credits prologue to this stirring action-adventure starring Errol Flynn and David Niven, another offender among historically inaccurate movies.
In fact, the Charge of the Light Brigade sent five regiments of elite cavalry galloping straight into the maw of an enemy barrage, with predictably messy results. Born of upper-class arrogance and rank incompetence, feuding between the stock-in-trade of inbred imbeciles like Lord Lucan and the Earl of Cardigan caused the whole thing in the first place.
Only the British aristocracy could’ve recast this type of military fiasco as a glorious triumph. Plus, it took place on the Crimean Peninsula during the 1854 Battle of Balaclava, not on the Northwest Frontier in a fictional version of Afghanistan as shown in the movie.
Bohemian Rhapsody (2022)
Rami Malik’s performance as flamboyant Queen frontman Freddie Mercury received ecstatic reviews, and rightly so. The movie’s adherence to the facts, not so much.
The premise that Mercury revealed his HIV diagnosis to the band in rehearsals for Live Aid, rendering the show a glorious last hurrah before he succumbed to the disease, makes for a compelling storyline, but has no basis in history. Mercury didn’t find out he was HIV-positive until 1987, two years after Live Aid, and the legendary charity bash was by no means his final stage appearance. Queen played 26 European shows in 1986 in support of the A Kind of Magic album, rounding off the tour at Knebworth, England, on August 9. This, not Live Aid, was Freddie’s swan song. He died on November 24, 1991, at the age of 45, after recording Queen’s final album, Innuendo, the previous year.
The movie also muddies the dates of the “We Will Rock You” sessions (1977 not 1980), and the humungous Rock in Rio concert (1985, not late ‘70s). Furthermore, the band did not split up over Freddie’s solo career. They were, instead, conspicuously busy in the years leading up to Live Aid, courting controversy (and no little condemnation from fellow musicians), by playing shows in apartheid South Africa, an episode entirely missing from the film.
Every Western Ever Made (1899 –)
Aside from a somewhat biased take on the whole “Cowboys and Indians” thing, Westerns got a lot wrong. First of all, people did not walk around heavily armed. Most towns, including Deadwood, Tombstone, Dodge City, and Abilene, prohibited the carrying of firearms. Fatal shootings and armed robberies were rare, as were attacks by “hostile” natives, and mano-a-mano, High Noon-style gunfights were virtually unheard of (the term “gunslinger” originated in a Hollywood movie).
According to historian W. Eugene Hollon, the Wild West was a “far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today.” Cowboys didn’t wear cowboy hats (derbies enjoyed more popularity), or pointy cowboy boots. Around one in three cowboys were African American or Mexican, and almost none were clean-shaven.
The myth of the lone drifter was just that (conditions were too arduous to go it solo). Women filled a wide variety of roles beyond that of dutiful wife or “saloon girl.” Outlaws like Billy the Kid and Jesse James were not munificent latter-day Robin Hoods but violent psychopaths, and Native Americans… well, someone could fill several books with the injustices done to Native Americans by the movie industry.
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