What, in your opinion, would be the most accurate movie to be made telling a story in or about a specific event / time / culture? Is there one movie that stands out in your mind as being so right, so representative of a particular time or place?
What is the definitive movie that captured the spirit of a particular time and place more so than any other?
War movies – English /American/ French/ Spanish Civil War, Mexican Wars, WW1 & 2, submarine based drama, Cold War, Vietnam war, Famous sea battles (recent or historical), Army training (boot camps), Air force, Spy / espionage, etc…
Historical movies – Ancient Romans, British (Raj, Africa, Colonial wars), Ancient China, Japanese culture, Africa, Great Depression, etc…
Modern (western) Culture – London crime / gangs, Underground drug culture, Gang culture in LA, Media coverage, Politics, portrayal of Police training / crime prevention methods etc…
Please add in any other field you deem a film you believe to have been (whilst fictional) a truly accurate portrayal of how it was or could have been to have lived through those days. Thanks.
Historical space movies - Apollo 13. My dad worked at NASA in Houston in the early 70s, and he and another colleague from that time agree that the movie really captured the atmosphere, habits, and look of the place. Obviously there were a few inaccuracies in the movie, but it captured the zeitgeist perfectly.
Age of Sail - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Has to be one of the most accurate reconstructions of an historical era that I’ve ever seen. Honorable mention goes to The Bounty.
Rome - Difficult, as they all have problems. I seem to recall, though, that Cleopatra had the historical aspects down pretty well, but Gladiator came closest to the “look and feel” of the era.
“The Paper” captured the madness that is a big-city newsroom,: general mess, downright filth, the cat who couldn’t use any chair but his own. Newsrooms are populated by freaks.
“All the President’s Men” had a grip on the odd work hours, the tense relationship with sources, the meeting with Big Editors when a serious story is heading to print.
Crime: Casino probably fudged the details, but it got the main events right.
British Raj: The Charge of the Light Brigade (the Erroll Flynn version) . The second half of the movie is complete bull@#$%. The first half, however, is based on an incident from the Sepoy Mutiny, and it actually gets an unexpectedly large number of details right.
Modern (western) Culture: Lone Star. Many of the people in this movie are stereotypes. But I live near the border, and I know a heck of a lot of people who fit those stereotypes.
WWII **Das Boot ** is great and I think **Saving Private Ryan ** and **Schindler’s List ** are also pretty accurate.
Viet Nam Well depending on who you ask but when I worked in a movie theatre showing Platoon the Vets seeing it all thought it was really accurate, at least on the feel of the place. Also it should be noted that in **Full Metal Jacket ** the Marine Drill Instructor was played by a Marine Drill Instructor. I think that was pretty accurate.
In many ways **Napolean Dynamite ** was very accurate at getting that ‘very small town in the middle of nowhere’ feel. It kind of creeped me out.
Andrei Rublev captured very well, I thought, the look and feel of medieval Russia. And they got the period clerical clothing correct as well (yay! octogonal mitres!)
Barry Lyndon was really good with 18th century Europe - iirc some of the costuming was actual clothing from that period. It captured well the stifling atmosphere and cultural stasis that was shortly to blow up.
While I want to give the film its due (I think it’s lot better than its given credit for – I think everyone cncentrated too much on the scandals), the film looks way too clean. Like a film set, in fact.
My choices for best Rome – Spartacus and a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Especially the latter. The homes really do look like the homes preserved in Pompeii, not some Hollywood version of them. he streets are genuinely crowded, with shops and stals jostling each other and pedestrians running int each other. Star Zero Mostel even omplained about all the squalor, saying that he didn’t ike all he shots of donkeys pooping in the streets (although, AFAIK, there isn’t a single shot of that. Lotsa donkeys, though.)
I’ll give you Platoon. But let me relate an anecdote that I heard my father say (and I later found out that it was from a comic named Glenn Steer, but it still applies):
My father and I were Christmas shopping several years ago, and he was wearing his old Vietnam jacket (he served a two-year stint in artillery), and was approached by an older woman, who told him, “Sir, I just want you to know that I can appreciate all you went through in Vietnam. I saw Full Metal Jacket.”
My father, without missing a beat, responded, “Ma’am, I can appreciate everything you went through in childbirth. I saw Look Who’s Talking.”
In a way Titanic was very accurate. The main character plot line was of course totally made-up but the details of the ship itself (design, look, feel) as well as how it went about sinking were very faithfully recreated and adhered to.
For Ancient China, let me recommend Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, based on Robert Hans Van Gulik’s book “The Haunted Monastery”, one in a series of adventures of the T’ang dynasty magistrate Djien Djieh Dee(who really did exist, and had a reputation as a detective). The TV-movie is faithful to the book, written by the scholarly nd meticulous Van Gulik, so one assumes it’s fairly faithful in its depiction of a Buddhist monastery and a Chinese district magistrate. The sets re pretty impressively convincing, especially for a TV movie, and the cast is entirely Asian (and, I think, of Chinese ancestry), a pretty impressive thing in a town that usually tried to pass off Caucasians as Chinese. Nicholas Meyer (the underapreciated King of TV Movies) wrote and may have directed.
Most certainly the most accurate asteroid impact movie, and one of the most accurate I’ve seen in the general category of Man vs. Nature, is Deep Impact.
Casino and Goodfellas are both fairly close to their source books(which are supposed to be rather accurate with lots of first-hand material) other then changing some names and combining a character or two.
A friend of mine who is an Asian scholar mentioned that in The Last Emperor, the child emperor stepped around a mosaic floortile that said “dragon” on the doorstep of the Forbidden City as he entered. He said this was a very accurate cultural observation, but that wasn’t highlighted - it was a subtle detail that conveyed to him the accuracy of the movie.
Amen. This movie was the reason I entered into this thread. Now if I could just work up the ire to pit anyone that says *Crimson Tide * was better.
Note to those whom watch only what gets to your local cinema every Friday. Das Boot is the standard-bearer by which any and all submarine-based war movies will be judged. Bar none. If you like historic war movies and haven’t seen this, well, you don’t like historic war movies.