Yes, I know. All visitors to my home are instructed to never mention this movie (among other things that piss off Canadians) in front of my Canadian wife. Otherwise, that’s all we’ll talk about for the rest of the day.
Personally, the misrepresentations that bother me the most, whether in a movie that’s based on a true story or just on a (fictional) book, are those that misrepresent character, especially if they portray people as somehow worse than they really were.
Geez! Who was the technical adviser for this movie-- Edward Teller?! :mad:
The great thing about Canadians is how they can take a punch!
Never mind that–beware how they can GIVE one!
But there were no Germans in the Imitation game movie , they needed a bad guy who was right there in the project.
Another example : In the movie Rudy , the coach was made out to be the bad guy who only played Rudy when he was forced to by the other players. In reality he was very much behind letting Rudy play.
Speaking of Germans, the 1960 British film Sink the Bismarck! has always interested me. For reasons of needing a villain, again, the German admiral in command of the Bismarck, Gunther Lutjens, is portrayed as the stereotypical ardent Nazi, bragging about how much the Fuhrer respects him and confident that this mission will bring greatness both to himself and to the Nazi cause.
In reality, Admiral Lutjens was a much more nuanced figure. He never joined the Nazi party, and seems to have disapproved of Hitler’s policies. He pointedly refused to give the Nazi salute when Hitler visited the Bismarck before its launch, using the traditional naval salute instead. He publicly protested the violence of the Kristallnacht, refused to enforce the Nuremburg laws for those under his command, and his wife had Jewish ancestry. He was also deeply pessimistic about the success of the Bismarck’s mission.
I’m not claiming Lutjens was any sort of hero–after all, however much he may have disapproved, he did fight for Nazi Germany when he might have resigned his commission–but he was certainly not the cliched ranting Nazi that the movie shows us.
Stop giving them ideas!
Oh, and the plane isn’t Enola Gay, but actually Anne Smith (or whatever) - renamed for the mistress of the studio exec that greenlit the movie.
And the plane is pulling a giant American flag behind it when it drops the bomb.
A 50 star flag.
One of the Chrises should play Einstein of course. Pine, Pratt, Hemsworth, or Evans, it’s all good.
I had suspected that movie executives were dissipated and stupid. Now I’m convinced of it.
The worst thing about Argo…unlike most films that rewrite history, it originally explicitly called the reality a political lie. After getting criticism (including from Mendez, himself), they rewrote that postscript, but…
Here’s A E Larsen’s three part essay on “Why They’re No Such Thing as a Historically Accurate Movie”:
which points out:
Thanks, Captain Amazing, interesting series of articles. I personally like this quote from the second article, which is similar to yours but I think gets a little closer to making the same point I’m trying to make:
I would also like to say thanks, for introducing me to what looks like a very interesting blog. I’ll have to put it on my regular reading list.
The same writer does a post about The Imitation Game. In it he nails what I hate about historically inaccurate movies. I don’t care whether William Wallace wore a skirt or gave speeches before battles, but when a movie makes things up ino order to shape events to match a predetermined message is when I feel manipulated and lied to.
The writers of Inherit the Wind wanted to make the Scopes trial story into a play where one side are ignorant buffoons. However, the actual Scopes trial did not feature any ignorant buffoons so he made a fictional version where one side did have ignorant buffoons. That is the honest thing to do, it is not his fault that some people think Inherit the Wind is a true story.
On the other hand, “Good Night and Good Luck” was painstaking in getting every detail right about the period costumes and sets but portrays Murrow as bravely leading the fight against McCarthy when, by his own admission, Murrow was actually rather late and uncertain about going after McCarthy. Not only that but one of the people the film shows McCarthy accusing, Annie Lee Moss, a pentagon communications workers was later proved to actually be a communist.
I don’t care about little details but I want the film to be honest, if they can’t do that write fiction.
the way it was done, though, was ham-fisted and cliché-ridden. You already have a number of conflicts you can use - the fight against time, the inherent difficult of the task, Turing hiding his homosexuality, and so on - to create dramatic tension. Mark Strong’s MI6 character could be the heavy, or you could use Charles Dance’s character but make him vastly more realistic. He doesn’t have to disbelieve Turing’s idea (which is insanely at odds with fact) he just has to pressure Turing to do it FASTER. As it is, he’s a very silly stock character in what should be a very serious a nuanced movie.
The thing is, the real Bletchly park employed hundreds and hundreds of people. It wasn’t 5 guys trying to break codes, all supervised by one angry guy who doesn’t believe in codebreaking.
I’m sure there were plenty of bullheaded officers in the British military who didn’t hold with this poncy nonsense of figuring things out with math and science when you could just charge the enemy with fixed bayonets. Those guys were all getting themselves killed on the front lines, not supervising cryptographers.
In real life, cryptography was considered an absolutely vital part of the war effort, and the Bletchly Park guys were given enormous resources to accomplish their goals.
Again, this is comparable to having the general in charge of the Manhattan project constantly threatening to shut the whole thing down because all physicists are fags and the whole thing is a fraud. That’s not what happened.
Now you’re just being ridiculous.
Einstein piloted the Enola Gay on the flight to Nagasaki.
I’m reminded of what Kevin Smith said about pitching his Superman script to, what’s his face, John Peters. When Smith was done, Peters told him he was missing some story beats. Stories need a structure, and movies need a structure that’s different than, say, a novel. This does not change if the movie is based on true events.
Since reality doesn’t come with story beats, stuff gets changed, shuffled around, streamlined, added, subtracted, all in the name of a flowing story structure. And what’s wrong with that? Narratives are a lousy way to get the facts. You want to know the facts about Alan Turing, I’m sure there’s plenty of biographies. You want a general idea of who he was, and how he saved millions, and how he and many other gay people were persecuted, then The Imitation Game does that.
One of my biggest complaints about Lincoln (and “based on true story” movies) is not so much embellishments that make the movie more interesting… It’s the complete alterarion of history.
In Lincoln, Spielberg chose to change the names of congressmen who voted against the 13th amendment, to supposedly spare the families of embarrassment. Seriously?
That is part of the historical record. The vote was the vote. It was 150 years ago. Few people have spent the time memorizing the evil politicians who voted against the amendment. The ones who have are insulted by this change.
Adding the opening scene in Lincoln, where he is not only approached by 2 black soldiers but one gives him serious attitude was pointlessly patrionizing, but it didn’t bother me nearly as much as the fictionalized vote.
These are the types of things that drive me bonkers.