What true stories are much better than the movies based on them. For the purposes of this thread only use movies that are proported to be true stories not ones vaguely inspired by true stories events.
Hollywood has to edit history to fit the format. Often they embellish the truth to make things more interesting or dramatic. What are examples of when Hollywood made things less interesting and dramatic?
I’ll give one example. Hacksaw Ridge told the story of Desmond Doss. He was a conscientious objector during WWII. He believed in the cause but his religious convictions did not allow him to kill or carry a weapon. He volunteered anyway and became a medic.
The movie made it seem like his fellow troops had no faith in him until they went into battle on Okinawa in the above mentioned battle of Hacksaw Ridge. Leaving aside the unrealistic violence in the movie, they didn’t give Doss nearly enough credit. In real life, by the time they got to Okinawa Doss had already seen combat on Guam and during the Battle of the Philippines on Leyte. He had already shown his bravery multiple times while saving wounded soldiers, he had been wounded several times and he was awarded two Bronze Stars (something they don’t easily give to PFCs). The movie shows him performing amazing acts of bravery and sacrifice but gives him credit for much less than he actually did.
I think any massive endeavor like a battle is going to have so many interesting side stories that it’s impossible to make any length film without leaving a lot of them out. There is also a lot of bewildering but fascinating background information that would just befuddle a casual audience looking for two hours entertainment.
The most recent one? I thought they did a good job showing what the real people did. No extra fictional characters eating up screen time like Charlton Heston and his son. Even the more unbelievable story lines like the Jonas brother character was real. Where it fell short were the combat scenes. Bunching all the planes up into one small piece of the sky looked dramatic but wasn’t realistic.
I’d love to see a remake of Good Morning, Vietnam using Adrian Cronauer’s original story rather than Robin Williams’ improv fest. Assuming the original still exists somewhere.
Much less the insane low-altitude hi-G pullouts by the dive bombers. Yeah, Dick Best tended to wait until the last instant to begin his pullouts, but that usually meant 1500 feet vs. 2000 feet for most of his fellow pilots, not the 300 feet seen in the film.
Pirate movies were due an adult upgrade from the old swashbucklers, but the Johnny Depp movies dragged the genre back to spectacular escapism, so the stories of Captain Kidd and Henry Morgan, Red Legs Greaves, etc. will have to wait.
The Greatest Game Ever Played was an extremely fun movie, but I found the book even more enjoyable. Maybe mostly to someone with some interest in golf, but the incredible events happened right during the final act of one of the greatest golfers up to that time, at a time the equipment was changing, and pros were becoming more active. But the underlying story is the kinda thing that if they wrote it as fiction, no one would believe it.
The antics of the real person that the character Omar from The Wire was based on were so wild they had to be toned down for the show. For example in the show Omar jumps out of a fourth story window during a shoot out and walks away just fine, in real life it was a sixth story window.
I sort of feel like a movie about Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane would be an example where the truth is better than the fiction; both Jack Aubrey (of the Aubrey-Maturin novels and the movie Master and Commander ) and Horatio Hornblower (of the books and movies) were both based largely on Cochrane’s exploits.
Apollo 13 had to cut out a ton of real-life drama to fit the run time. The actual story is described in riveting detail in former NASA control engineer Gene Kranz’ autobiography, Failure is Not an Option. It basically did go down like in the film, only imagine more things going wrong.
It’s a great book. I read it in 2006 and still remember it fondly.