It seems that the invasion of Grenada in Heartbreak Ridge was fairly accurate with the execption of the rescue of the medical students.
Well, imagine my surprise after watching Time After Time when I realized that HG Wells never met Jack the Ripper and they didn’t go into the future. Man, I was bummed. Talk about inaccuracies!
Crusoe and Bryan, the movie you are thinking of is U-571.
Could there be a worse movie. I won’t get started on why I hate this movie so much. Suffice it to say, that dates when it happened were wrong and the nationality of the sailors was wrong. It was just bad.
Rick
I should have been more specific – I meant recent ones where there might still be living survivors and families of those that died.
One that hasn’t been mentioned is The Hurricane, which despite a rather good performance by Denzel Washington as Reuben Carter, will drive anyone familliar with the real story insane.
Yeah and I still wonder why that won.
Because we got to see DiCaprio sink to the bottom of the sea. That’s gotta be worth a trophy!
Oo! I just remembered one for “inaccurate”: Birdman of Alcatraz. Burt Lancaster won an Oscar for his protryal as a rather sensitive, humane inmate redeemed through his kindness to birds.
IIRC Robert Stroud (the real “Birdman”) was a vicious bastard who had to be kept in solitary confinement and segregated from other inmates because he was so prone to lethally violent rages. He did keep birds when he was in prison at Leavenworth, but got in deep doo-doo when he was caught using his “speically ordered help-the-birdies equipment” to build a still.
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*Originally posted by ShibbOleth *
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Can you give some examples of what makes one accurate and the other inaccurate? Just curious, I’ve only seen one of these and it’s been a while. How would you compare Full Metal Jacket? 
To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve seen them I don’t really remember. Mostly it was technical stuff; maneuvers, dealing with an enemy village, etc. Oliver Stone just changed a LOT of things to make the US soldiers seem more vicious and sadistic than most soldiers were. I’m not a big fan of war or war movies, but as a film maker, I feel that someone who openly opposed and protested the Vietnam War, and said many derogetory things about the US soldiers who fought there, should not be making a movie glorifying it. It’s just wrong and hypocritical.
As far as Full Metal Jacket goes, it was fairly accurate, though a little over dramatized. The story is completely fictional, but the technical details (minus some uniform flaws) were pretty much on the mark.
Nothing could possibly be worse than the cartoon Anastasia. In this film, we learned that the Romanovs weren’t executed by the Bolsheviks while their fleeing daughters were beyonetted- They were killed when a train was derailed- By the ghost of Rasputin and an albino bat! Adding to the silliness is the fact that DNA evidence disproved the claim of ‘Anna’ as the real Anastasia years earlier. I always wondered what studio nutjob dreamed up theis travesty, let alone thought children would be interested in it.
Tora Tora Tora despite being hobbled by slightly inaccurate japanese fighter planes (not like there were dozens of Zeros laying around to be used), was accurate to the point of being painfully dull.
Can any WWII buffs comment on Midway? Aside from the melodramatic subplots that flesh out a few characters, it always impressed me as apparently being based on the actual timeline of events and actual participants.
That and the fact it makes it look like Rapsputin started the Russian Revolution.
I’d still rather watch that then the abysmalPearl Harbor
I actually truly enjoyed Tora Tora Tora… Never really understood why people thought it to be dull, I enjoyed it far more than Pearl Harbor…
I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time two days ago, and was enthralled. Imagine my surprise when I started to do some basic internet research on the movie and discovered its controversies. In the movie, of course, Alec Guiness’ army colonel becomes an incredibly ironic figure - after standing up to the Japanese demands on a point of honor, he subsequently meets and exceeds those demands (on the same point of honor). The actual colonel was no where near as duplicit and tried to sabotage the bridge at every opportunity. I understand that the men who were actually there vigorously protested the movie because of its portrayal of the colonel, and the dwindling survivors still refuse to see it. The brutal Japanese commander in the movie, Saito, was in real life a reasonable lieutenant - and the British colonel defended him during a war crimes tribunal.
Except they didn’t all line up to sign it in tableaux on July 4
TridCloudwalker - Oliver Stone was a Vietnam vet who was there- I am not judging his film making abilities, but, as another who was there, alot of his scenes were accurate and caught the “feel” of what it was like…
As for inaccurate - any John Wayne war movie, my favorite is “Green Berets”, nothing like jumping out of a helicopter with full field gear…
The movie “Quills,” about the Marquis de Sade, was so inaccurate that it was offensive. It portrayed de Sade as some sort of naughty champion of creative and artistic freedom; a libertine and a pervert, certainly, but at least not a hypocrite like the other characters. Anybody who knows anything about the real de Sade knows that this guy was WAY beyond the “creative perversion” of someone like Salvador Dali; he was, in fact, a monstrous, woman-hating rapist and torturer who believed that “superior” men such as himself should have the right to rape and even murder “lesser” people for amusement. In short, he was a sick, Ted Bundy-like SOB. But that didn’t work for the filmmaker’s agenda, so they cleaned him up from “beastly” to “amusingly unpleasant.” If you’re going to make a movie about someone like de Sade, at least be honest enough to portray him as he really was. . .
And that the common people of Russia had been SO much happier when they were ruled by a Czar!