[Hank Reinhardt]

While the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain, and it is not required that it educate, it does have duty not to mis-inform its audience. This movie misinforms, and it was done deliberately.

[Marcos Cantu]

[Caleb Hallgren]

[Marcos Cantu]

[Chad Arnow]

[Caleb Hallgren]

[Nathan Robinson]

Movies are fantasy. Fantasy in inspired by many things, including actual fact.

Ever see a movie about computer hackers? The amount of false, fake, misrepresented, impossible, and otherwise absurd things in them is laughable to people who actually know about this stuff. Often times it's extremely frustrating to watch because it propagates a lot of myths and other ridiculous stereotypes. Oh well!

Watching "Sneakers" made me cringe, until I realized that it was an extremely entertaining movie. I remember watching "Rising Sun" and seeing them use a computer for image manipulation. They removed the heads of a video image and replaced them with other heads. The way they did this made me cringe, as it was quite simplified and utterly impossible.

How about movies about military, mobsters, drug trafficking, the music scene, art, business, etc. etc. etc. etc. Every single one of these concepts is bastardized in the movies. If you think that the early years of pot and cocaine selling was accurately depicted in the movie "Blow", then I suspect that you're misguided. I'm sure it shares enough commonalities with it to make those in the "know" take notice, I'd bet there is enough different and made up stuff in there to annoy those same people.

Why is this? Because almost all movies, especially mainstream movies, are about telling stories and entertaining people. These things are fantasy. They are not documentaries. They are not factual accounts. In the case of "Kingdom", the Crusades and other historical pieces are simply a backdrop to the movie. It's a vehicle for telling a story (albeit, a bad story in this case). Any person looking at movies with the expectation that they are watching a factual account of reality is misguided, at best.

I don't believe these studios sell their product in their marketing materials as an accurate historical record of actual events. In some movies, the phrase "based on true events" is often not vague enough for my tastes, but it's there and it's vague.

[Hank Reinhardt]

Let me ask one question, and then abandon this discussion. Why did Ridly Scott seek approvel from the Moslems, and yet never talked to any Christain organization or church? Think about it.

[Nathan Robinson]

[Jean Thibodeau]

What is depressing is stuff like this: I was talking to one of my best friend about history and politics in general and mentioned Mao Tse Tung ( Spelling ? ) and the fact that he was responsible for an estimated 70 million deaths and that idealists wanting to create their version of Paradise on Earth were responsible for more deaths than Hitler !

Now the depressing part was that his intelligent teenage kid asked in all seriousness who is / was Mao Tse Tung.

What are they teaching or not teaching in schools these days as far as history is concerned.

Movies that distort history are of little harm if people are educated about the real thing and although we might find inaccuracies annoying, we can and should just take them for what they are " entertainment ".

It's the people totally unaware of anything that happened before they were born or even their ten birthday that I worry about: Not only about their ignorance of history but these people clueless of the past make up the bulk of " voters " in our elections.

Their B.S. detector is set very very low: People who know history are a lot harder to fool I believe.

[Edward Hitchens]

[Roger Hooper]

The History Channel? That place has been a great disappointment to me. When watching programs concerning subjects I know something about, I've been surprised at the number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications in them. Lately there has been a disheartening number of Irrational History programs that use a "Da Vinci Code" method of looking at their subjects.

I'd feel better about movies like Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, if the phrase, "A Historical Fantasy" were attached to the titles. Then, the public, most of whom have only a nodding acquaintance with history, would be warned going in that they should have a grain of salt handy.

I prefer Fantasy or Sci Fi movies where the makers can let their creativity run free.

[Taylor Ellis]

[Hank Reinhardt]

He sought approval from several Islamic organizations in the US. They approve. No Christian groups were consulted at all.

[Andy Bain]

My gut reaction to this is 'So what?' If I was making a similar movie in which I was portraying a religion I knew little or nothing about I might consult with members of said religion to ensure I was giving them a fair shake. Maybe he was doing the same. But, as Nathan said, this has little to do with whether or not the movie is historically accurate. Back to the discussion.

When it comes to historical inaccuracies in movies, there's a lot I can let go. Sometimes the inaccuracies are purposely left in. An example would be using butted mail when rivetted would be more accurate. It might be too expensive or time consuming to buy/make the rivetted mail, so the filmmakers choose to use butted instead. The siege of Troy lasted ten years, yet in the movie I don't think it took ten weeks. I'm guessing the director didn't feel the length of the siege was important to the story he was telling. In Arthur, some of the knights were using in appropriate weapons for the time period. That was probably done so each character could have something to help set him apart from the others. If there seems to be a rational reason why the 'error' was left then I can shrug and enjoy the movie. If not, I'll still enjoy the movie. I may, however, nitpick it to death afterwards.

[Kirk Lee Spencer]

Hi all…

The really sad part is that revisionist movies are great examples of what “history” has become in the academy today. At the university I took a course called political history. I thought it was going to lean the history of politics, but the class was about how to use history to achieve a political (propagandistic) end. I took several other courses on “new historicism,” “modern hermeneutics” and “cultural history” and I learned that history (at least in the academy) considered ideas such as authorial intention or original context as embarrassingly quaint. In other words, what most of you believe would be laughed out of class. I learned that “no one really knows what happened, and all the archival evidence, especially canonical works of literature and history are distorted by the authors agenda and can not be trusted. I learned that history has always been about using made up stories about the past to get what you want, so why should we perpetuate this romantic myth that we can somehow know what happened in the past…even more that we can pass it on in an objective unbiased fashion.”

I personally don’t believe this. People have used history for selfish means and we all have our biases. However, I do believe that the basic outline of events and personalities have been passed on accurately and should be preserved and not further distorted. Many times the biases can be discovered by comparing different perspectives on an event.
I hope and believe that the love of history extends for beyond the academy and this parasitic revisionist form will soon pass away before the death of its host.

It is good to have a community (such as myArmoury) of those interested in “what actually happened.” And the passion should be passed on not diminished. The idea that film is just entertainment and we should not voice concerns about distortions, presupposes that the media has not blurred the boundary between education and entertainment. This is not the case. We have a generation of young people who have grown up on “infotainment.” Surveys of people on the street shows over and over again that they have been educated by the mass media more than the failing education system. They are essentially illiterate in classical education… and this is by design it is not an accident. The idea that movies are only entertainment and everyone knows it is only fiction, also presupposes that the movie does something at the beginning to let the audience know that this is “an artistic work of fiction,” or “it is loosely based on historical figures and events.” While I can remember these “warnings” on epics in older film (which were actually more historically accurate, though much more cheezey), I can not remember them in recent “historical” epics. As a matter of fact the movie “Braveheart” begins with a sort of revisionist manifesto “History is written by those who have hanged heroes.” The music in the alliteration and the Scottish brogue voice makes me want to believe it… for it is such a beautiful statement are resonates within the anti-authoritarian culture. But there are many histories, only some were written by those who have not hanged heroes and there is also archival and archeological evidence to gives us a sense of the outline of what actually happened. The movie “King Arthur” begins with this statement: “Recent discovered archeological evidence sheds light on his true identity.” Does anyone know what this “recent” evidence is? I have not heard of it. If there really is no recent archeological evidence on King Arthur that supports the elements of the movie, then it would not be too far out of line to suppose that this blurb at the beginning of a movie was inserted to try and encourage the audience to see it as our best guess at what actually happened according to the archeologists. The point is that revisionist history looses its propagandistic power if it clearly identifies itself for what it is. It must prevaricate to maintain the illusion and retain its parasitic hold upon the folk idea of history.

I watched the extended version of Gladiator and the hours of commentary… nowhere did it mention that Scott had enlarged the proportions of the buildings, especially the Coliseum and the Via Sacra to give it the drama he wanted. It is fine that he did these things. I think it makes for a better movie and I would not have it any other way. My problem is that it is not being expressed and thus continuing the illusion that that was the real Rome. I heard that Scott had historians on the payroll and when they gave him suggestions he would sometimes remark, “no one really knows what happened.” That might be true in some cases, but we do know the size and dimensions of the Coliseum and Via Sacra. If he disclosed that he had exaggerated the dimensions people might assume that he exaggerated the story (although I thought the story fit into the gaps pretty well) much much better than “Kingdom of Heaven.”

These movies are entertaining… I own them and have watched them many times. I really like Maximus’ cry from the center of the area, “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!!!” It seems to resonate with the frustrations of the film industry. I just wish that history did not have to become a casualty, especially when the story in the history books is often more entertaining then the sermons that end up on the screen.

Sorry for the rambling rant… I guess, what I am trying to say is, while movies are primarily entertainment, as it should be, it is very naive to believe that they are only entertainment… especially in today’s culture. The filmmakers know that the popular understanding of history is what actually happened and so, even as revisionists, they have the responsibility to state up-front the film is a work of fiction, art or revisionist in nature. Of course they would not do that, because as soon as they did it would loose its revisionist power.

ks

[Taylor Ellis]

I really think it doesn't matter anywhere near enough to get upset about. Sure it annoyed me when Saladin was this all merciful hero (when he certainly was not), but Balian was portrayed as more heroic than he was historically. In my experience, people either become interested because of what they see or read (like 99% of us I'm sure), and endeavor to learn more from places like myArmoury, or, they simply don't care enough about the details to even remember anything historically pertinent about the movie the next day.

[Joe Fults]

I find it somewhat ironic to have seen so many discussions in forums like this one about the need to dispel mythes about swords over the past few years, while freshly minted mythes about the times and context in which they were used are so easily dismissed.

Interesting.

[Hank Reinhardt]

Hey Joe, very well put...Hank

[Chad Arnow]