History vs Cinema

If any art form has any sort of effect at all, it's going to have some beneficial and some harmful. There's no way art is utterly objective or that it's completely wholesome.

As for historical accuracy, that's a chimera that refuses to sit still. For some, Braveheart is so bad it's banned from discussion (e.g. on the MEDIEV-L discussion list, which is made up of medieval professionals). In other areas, the inaccuracies are trivial--I may have mentioned before someone who objects to an ahistorical font choice on a movie marquee. In yet another direction, the objection might be to whether some historical figure is presented in a favorable or unfavorable light, and the historians themselves are not of one opinion. Where's the accuracy there?

At still another extreme, if someone claimed historical accuracy and put American Indians in the Third Crusade, probably all would agree that was not correct. But if someone put Assassins in the First Crusade, I bet many in a general audience wouldn't blink and would wonder why that one fellow stood up, screamed insults at the screen and stalked out.

For myself, it wasn't the historical inaccuracies that bothered me about Braveheart. I just thought it was hamhanded story telling. That's the criterion I bring to books or movies. Tell me a good story and tell it well, and I'll forgive a fair amount of historical manhandling.
 
I suppose if you are Scottish you might have an issue with your National Hero being modelled on the likeness of someone who expressed questionable views on a number of subjects.
Is that anyone's fault but the sculptors?

I wonder how much of an increase in tourism pounds Scotland and the Wallace monument got from a single inaccurate film?
 
"The Imitation Game", a film about Turing and Bletchley Park, what put me off this film and made me turn it off was someone stating that they had cracked an Enigma message by using frequency analysis, which given how the Enigma machine worked is total b******t!!!
PS. The way frequency analysis works is you take a very large encrypted message ( the bigger the better ) and count up all the letters, if this is a letter substitute cipher then the letter most used corresponds to the most used letter in that language, ei if it was English then the letter is E, when you use an Enigma machine you can press the same key over and over and never get the same letter twice, thus rendering frequency analysis impossible, the one flaw the machine had ( apart from its human operators ) was that it never encrypted a letter as it's self, ei no matter how many times you pressed E it would never come up as E, how the boffins used this weakness against it am afraid I don't know???
 
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I think my late uncle was less than taken with the Imitation Game (assuming that's the one with Cumberbatch in it) because apparently Bletchley Park was portrayed as a tiny operation, and other historical inaccuracies were rife.

My great aunt worked there, incidentally.
 
So true. John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

His worst acting performance and one the world films of all time. More unfortunate was that the movie filmed in place contaminated by nuclear fallout from a a nearby atom bomb test site. Many of those invpolved in film died cancer of one sort or anther including Wayne.
 
I think my late uncle was less than taken with the Imitation Game (assuming that's the one with Cumberbatch in it) because apparently Bletchley Park was portrayed as a tiny operation, and other historical inaccuracies were rife.

My great aunt worked there, incidentally.

My great aunt, who worked there ( and didn’t tell anyone until she got a medal a few years ago) has just turned 100.
 
Whaddya mean?

The Price Valiant that im familiar with is a comic strip character, a 1954 film with Robert Wagner in the lead role and, an animated series produced about 30 years back. It's set in the the fantasy world of King Arthur. I seriously doubt Prince Valiant is a an historical figure at all.:oops:
 
The Price Valiant that im familiar with is a comic strip character, a 1954 film with Robert Wagner in the lead role and, an animated series produced about 30 years back. It's set in the the fantasy world of King Arthur. I seriously doubt Prince Valiant is a an historical figure at all.:oops:

Next thing you will tell me Lord of the Rings is made up.

He defeated the Vikings with a magic sword and then peace and chivalry reigned over the land.
 
Next thing you will tell me Lord of the Rings is made up.

He defeated the Vikings with a magic sword and then peace and chivalry reigned over the land.

Well , yes LOTR is made up

But King Arthur is a work fiction and so is Camelot and yet , the dreamer in me wishes that they were real.:confused:
 
A few years ago a new statue of William Wallace was erected in Scotland and it was the spitting image of Mel Gibson in Braveheart. If that's not distorting history, I don't know what is.
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I think it likely that William Wallace would not be amused by this. He would take issue with this statue, Mel Gibson and his movie.
 
After a quick google it seems it had paint thrown on it and had its face gouged. So no not decapitated.
 

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