I disagree. Much as I found Die Hard 2’s inaccuracies to be silly, there are sometimes moments in movies where you, as the audience, must say to yourself, “Okay, I know that this premise is ridiculous, but it’s the only way that this upcoming plot point is going to work, so I’ll just suspend my disbelief even more than usual, pretend I live in a world where such a thing is plausible, and enjoy the plot point for what it is”. I remember doing exactly this when I saw this very film, SO THAT I could enjoy* the horror of the British Airways jetliner crashing. It’s all about whether you want to make a little extra effort in order to enjoy the work – in other words, how much do YOU care – and it’s possible the director was well aware that such an effort would be necessary in this case.
That said, I do prefer movies where such an effort on my part is not expected or required.
(*Maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.)
P.S. As others have alluded to, an interesting thing is how different people are bothered by different things, depending on their knowledge base or expertise. I have ornithologist friends who are bothered when they hear a bird in the background soundtrack of a film which doesn’t belong in the film’s supposed location.
For me, it’s always the little things that really bug me. In that movie, I got jarred out of my suspension of disbelief when the Princess and her handmaiden, not wishing to be overheard in their discussion at Edward’s castle, kept their conversation private by having it in French. “Right,” I thought, “because who in the court of Edward I would have spoken French?” :rolleyes:
If the director would have made sure that all aspects of Pearl Harbor were historically correct, it would have been a great movie. They didn’t do that, and it turned out to be worth the eight dollars my wife and I spent seeing it at an afternoon matinee.
On the other hand, Shakespeare in Love was a great movie, and the pains taken to make the portrayal as accurate as possible within the fictional story made it so.
I spent eight bucks to see Pearl Harbor and was entertained for a couple of hours. I did figure I got my eight bucks worth, but I didn’t watch it when it came on cable tv, nor was I interested in the DVD.
I spent the same eight bucks to see Shakespeare in Love, and was enthralled. We returned the next afternoon with another couple who wanted to see it based on our enthusiasm. I bought the DVD on the day it was released so I can share this great movie with friends who missed it at the theaters and so that I can watch it whenever I like.
I had just finished Cash’s autobiography “Man in Black” before seeing Walk the Line… pretty accurate portrayal of his father if John R Cash is to be believed.
The accuracy/artistic license debate will never be satisfied to everyone’s satisfaction. Personally, I feel that the intent of the artist has much to do with how forgiving I am in the face of departures from the source material. Relatively few people raise any grief about the fact that Shakespeare inserts mention of a striking clock in the dialog of Julius Caesar, or complain that the Caesar’s murder and funeral are portrayed as happening on the same day. The intent of the play is to paint a portrait of Brutus as a good and noble man whose virtues are manipulated into action by the unscrupulous conspirators. JFK, on the other hand, was intended to portray “the real” truth behind Kennedy’s assassination and thereby promote Oliver Stone’s own brand of tinfoil hat revisionist history. That he brushed aside ironclad evidence on many factors in favor of wacko, discredited conspiracy theory horseshit was hypocritical in the extreme.
One that glared out at me because it’s integral to the plot of the movie was in Snakes on a Plane, when they used (non-venemous) scarlet king snakes to represent (venemous) coral snakes. I have seen enough nature shows on TV to know that the king snakes have red and black bands touching each other and coral snakes have red and yellow bands touching. Red and yellow, kill a fellow, red and black, nice to Jack. I know they used other non-venomous snakes in the movie, but I didn’t pick those snakes out as readily as I did the king snakes. I felt the producers could have easily used CGI or animatronic coral snakes if they wished to be more realistic without putting the cast and crew at risk of envenomation. SoaP wasn’t unique, either, I constantly see this in movies and TV shows.