It's really when the changes are ultra-drastic and gratuitous, and serve only to
really skew history that I get put out. Okay, I understand that movies are entertainment first, education a distant second (or at least they
should be), and I understand that for the purposes of dramatical license, filmmaker's purpose and fitting everything into a two-hour time frame, there's going to not going to be place for
everything about a person's life or a historical event to be covered (that's what wider reading's for). So yeah, I can understand and forgive a movie glossing over
some instances (it helps if the movie's actually
good, like
JFK - although Oliver Stone's "everyone-killed-JFK-who-was-a-saint" stance doesn't do him many favours).
But there are some movies that just cross the line. Step forward and prepare for your kicking,
The Patriot.
Not only is it blatant propaganda (the Americans are pretty much whiter-than-white, the English vile), and not only does it insult the intelligence slightly by focussing on seemingly the one rich white man in the eighteenth-century Southern states enlightened enough to free his slaves, who still appear quite happy to work for him (I mean, God, even
George Washington owned slaves, and there's few historical figures regarded in a more saintly light than him). Not only did Washington's offer to free the slaves not happen (and was in fact a
British initiative, based on the reading I've done). It's crappy and infuriating, but I could probably brush it off as typical Hollywood airbrushing of history.
But then the church massacre. That's when the line isn't just crossed, the filmmakers actually stop and urinate on it. I don't doubt that eighteenth century British occupiers were probably on the 'horrendously snobby' side of social mores, and that the War of Independence was brutal on both sides, but there's just
no need to transpose a representation of an
actual massacre that occurred during World War Two (a German-occupied French village) to the War of Independence and make the British responsible for it just so that you can make some boo-hiss villains without having to go to the effort of checking your facts. It's not just lazy, in my opinion, it's insulting - it's insulting to the intelligence, it's insulting to the British, it's insulting to the memories of the actual French citizens who died in the actual massacre to have the atrocity that killed them cheapened for the sake of one-dimensional filmmaking techniques, it's insulting to the discerning filmgoer. There were probably plenty of
real life brutalities (again, on both sides) that the filmmakers could have used if they'd just done some research. Hate is not strong enough to describe how I feel towards that movie.
'Tom Cruise' and 'Battle of Britain' are two phrases that should never be connected in a sentence.
And this WW2 thing annoys me too; okay, the British aren't exactly shy about mythologising their experiences in World War Two (the whole 'We British Were The Few Who Stood Up To The Nazis' thing), but at least it's based to some degree on the fact of the situation at the time (even if it does conveniently gloss over the many foriegn nationals who ALSO fought the Nazis based from Britain / North Africa). But the American 'We Saved The World And Destroyed Nazism Single-Handed' myth as shown by Hollywood is slightly more infuriating because not only does it gloss over the many others who fought in the war, it actively distorts history to the degree that
Americans are credited with things they didn't do in order to show this myth. Say what you will about the British perspective, at least a British filmmaker wouldn't try and give Britain credit for winning the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Stalingrad (okay, the Russians all had British accents in
Enemy at the Gates, but they were all still actually supposed to be Russians).
Okay. Rant over. Carry on.
But....the part of Tavington being killed with the American flag on the flag pole, surely that happened. 