"Which Movies Got History Right (Round 1C)" Topic

How can a movie based on fiction get history right? Just 3 of many examples.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World – Fiction
Saving Private Ryan – Fiction
Old Yeller – Fiction

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

― Bill Watterson

Rallynow, I'd say a movie based on fiction has got its history right if nothing in the movie is historically wrong. Unless you'd say it was OK for the ship's officers in Master and Commander to synchronize Indiglo watches or for Saving Private Ryan to have troops in Desert Storm period uniforms because both stories were fiction?

If a work of fiction is set in a specific historical time period, then the historical details should be relevent to the time frame.

For example, Master And Commander is set at the turn of the 19th Century. So it would be un-historical for them to be sailing aboard a steel-hulled dreadnought.

The plot and characters may be purely fictional, but the world they inhabit is based on reality. So of course a movie can get the history right…

SPR for the D-Day opening.

As to the question of whether fiction can get history right, of course it can. The historical elements are the setting and events within which the fictional story takes place. These can be handled with accuracy to history, even if the depicted "small" events of the story never took place.

As it is, most historical works necessarily require certain levels of assumption on the part of the researcher, and dramatizations of history even moreso. After all, it is nearly impossible to know what anyone was actually thinking, or who all might have been present, or even the actual words anyone said absent physical recording devices. We are instead relying on the faulty depictions of memory, which invariably either discard details or inflate them or simply create them out of the tattered remnants of fading neurons.

Master and commander is AURHENTIC not historically correct. It shows life on board a Royal Navy Frigate better than anything before and probably after.

"The Patriot"

Oh yes, that THOROUGHLY deserves a place in this poll :D