Movies with incorrect basic premises?

Cafe Society
#1

So I was watching the first part of “Fury” last night, and was struck again by the basic inaccuracy of the premise. That premise being that at the very end of WWII the fighting in the West was particularly savage and fanatical with very high casualties among the American troops, and that the army was at the breaking point, both morale-wise and logistically. They also implied that men and tanks were at a premium in the US Army.

This just wasn’t the case. By that point in the war, the US units were at full strength and then some, and essentially crossed the Rhine in early March, and by about April 15, the 2nd Armored Division (the division that “Fury” and her crew were part of) had stopped fighting altogether, as they’d reached the Elbe river, and were waiting for the Russians to meet them.

They’d covered the distance from roughly the Dutch border to the Elbe in about a month. Armies can’t do that kind of thing unless the resistance against them has essentially collapsed and their logistical train is operating at high efficiency. That’s a Desert Storm level speed of advance, not the kind of thing done while your troops are demoralized, under supplied, and fighting hard against a determined opposition.
Any other movies with such basic inaccuracies, sci-fi and fantasy notwithstanding?

#2

Inglorious Basterds

#3

Lucy.
Sometimes you just gotta go with it but if the movie was more entertaining then it wouldn’t have been such a deal, in my opinion. While watching it I kept thinking about how the car chase and gunfight at the end were just pointless.

#4

Double Jeopardy

#5

Double Jeopardy is based on not understanding the definition of double jeopardy.

#6

It’s double Double Jeopardy!

#7

I feel the OP misread the basic premise of Fury. I feel the movie was about a group of veterans approaching the end of their war and wondering if they would be able to return to their civilian lives after experiencing the brutalities of combat.

#8

I don’t think I misread it at all; I thought it was more about the contrast in humanity between the grizzled vets and the fresh newbie, and how war dehumanizes everyone, and that there’s a sort of point of no return that the vets are past, but the rookie wasn’t. In that sense, the movie did fine.

But my point still remains- they had to come up with a contrived and inaccurate situation to portray that. In April 1945, the manpower situation wasn’t such that they’d be dropping untrained clerks into assistant driver positions in front-line tank crews. The US Army was at its all-time largest in March 1945, and at that point, its training programs were at their peak as well. There would have been almost zero chance that a green kid straight out of the most basic training would be in Norman’s position.

#9

Indeed so. I also had to sit through the stupid fucking Serving Sara one time, which is premised on the idea that having a New York divorce would give a jilted wife a more equitable property division than a Texas divorce would. You could fill a whole post with a bunch of hypotheticals and asterisks about whether that’s true in any given circumstance, but Texas recognizes community property and the divorce laws here weren’t written by a bunch of “good old boys” to screw over wives like the movie claims.

#10

“I’ll take Ashley Judd movies for $200, Alex…”

“… and… sound effect …its the daily double…”

#11

Evidently the same thing popped up in the 1922 Broadway play It Is the Law and the 1924 movie made from it.

The film is believed to have been lost in a studio fire.

#12

Die Hard 2, AKA the Stupidest Movie Ever Made.

#13

The Matrix seems to be based on the premise that human beings create energy and can be used as batteries.

#14

May I ask your source(s) for the above?

#15

About a thousand books on the war.

#16

Yeah. And for an anecdote, my father was in an armored division at this time. Their biggest problem was outrunning their supply chain, they were moving so fast.
IIRC some new battalions were put more or less behind the lines, which was a problem at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. But that just shows the command felt they could use them in non-essential jobs.

#17

I don’t feel it was implausible. Some German units did fight right up to the final day of the war (and SS units, such as the one in the movie, were less likely to give up).

And while the United States Army didn’t run low on men, it was based more on an ongoing supply line of new soldiers rather than a reduction of casualties. The 3rd Infantry Division, which had around 15,000 men in it, took 26,000 casualties during the war. Obviously the only way the unit stayed in existence was because of a constant supply of new soldiers to replace the casualties.

#18

Good.

#19

The plot of The Blues Brothers revolves around taxing church property in Illinois.

#20

I’ve always been bothered by all the harping about this scientific “inaccuracy”. In the first film, Morpheus specifically says that the process of making humans batteries was created in part, by the machines using some sort of “fusion”–essentially, scifi talk about some scientific advance beyond our current capability. Also, the battery meme is not really a major plot point at all. It’s a thematic McGuffin that’s used just to create a slavery metaphor. I chalk that up to simple poetic license.

The two sequels still suck, though.