Historical Films Historians Can't Stand To Watch

When it comes to historical films, you have to allow for a certain amount of creative license. For one thing, there's a huge swatch of history for which we lack any sort of reliable visual or audio record of how people actually spoke, dressed, or went about their daily lives. And real life rarely follows a convenient narrative arc neatly organized into rising action, climax, and falling action. Often, in order to turn a historical film into effective entertainment, some liberties have to be taken with the actual history.

As a result, there are few historical films you can use as research into how things actually were during their respective time periods. But most period pieces at least get most of the details right — if only to establish verisimilitude, that "truthy" feel. Some historical movies don't do a very good job at this, and some — like the films on this list — irritate actual historians to no end because they get their history so very, very wrong. And they're not comedies, where the wrongness might be part of the joke. These are serious films that want us to believe that we're getting a magical glimpse into the past — and instead have become the historical films historians can't stand to watch.

Gladiator is a great movie. The story of a Roman general who is betrayed by the treacherous son of the emperor and forced to fight as an anonymous gladiator in order to get close enough for his revenge, it evokes the Roman Empire extremely well, even if it is a film notorious for the magical pillow that appears under Russell Crowe's head during his death scene.

But as good-looking and dramatic as Gladiator is, when Daily History broke down its historical accuracy, it was found to be wanting. From the clothes worn by the German barbarians in the film's opening battle to the extreme unlikelihood that Emperor Marcus Aurelius would — or could — convey imperial power to a general as depicted, the movie gets a lot of stuff wrong. For example, in the film, the emperor doesn't like or trust his son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who then murders his father in order to seize the throne. But in reality, Aurelius named Commodus co-emperor 14 years before his death, and Commodus took power peacefully.

Most egregiously, of course, the film shows Emperor Commodus dying at the hands of Russel Crowe's Maximus. Commodus was widely disliked, and he was assassinated in his bath in 192 CE after ruling the empire for 12 long years. It's little wonder that many of the consultants hired to guide the historical accuracy of the film asked not to be listed in the credits.

Samurai are cool. In this 2003 film, Tom Cruise plays a former US Army officer who's going through some serious PTSD and who takes a job helping to modernize Japan's military. He's seduced into supporting a doomed but noble samurai rebellion, training to become a samurai warrior even as the way of life they represent is about to be destroyed forever.

It's an excellent narrative, and it's largely based on the true story of Saigō Takamori. As historian Mark Ravina explains, after helping to restore the power of the emperor in what is known as the Meji Restoration, Takamori was shocked when the emperor stripped the samurai of their power and privileges, and he led a rebellion. Unfortunately, the film isn't very concerned with historical accuracy. As War History Online notes, while it's true that Japan hired Western consultants like that, none of them were American. And the samurai were also familiar with modern weaponry and would have used firearms in their battles.

Worse, the samurai cause isn't presented realistically. In reality, it was more about class. The creation of a modern professional army elevated a class of people the samurai regarded as beneath them, and the main motive was to maintain their power and wealth. And, of course, the film shows ninjas attacking the samurai. Ninjas make everything better, but Japan hadn't seen actual ninjas in centuries by that point in history.

Argo is a great movie. Based on the real-life rescue of American diplomatic workers hidden by their Canadian peers for months after the Iranian revolution in 1979, it's easy to see why it won the Oscar for Best Film in 2013. The story of a fake sci-fi film production funded by the CIA as cover for a tense rescue operation is entertaining as heck.

It's too bad that almost nothing shown in the film actually happened. It might as well be considered fiction.

Sure, the whole fake film operation that allowed the Americans to assume the identities of a Canadian film crew in order to escape Tehran is 100-percent true. But as Indiewire reports, almost all of the details in the film are wrong. Scenes like the one in which the Americans are forced to somehow pretend they know what they're doing in a public market while suspicious Iranians watch them closely, or when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chases their plane as it races for takeoff, simply never happened. And as Slate notes, the character of Lester Siegel (memorably portrayed by Alan Arkin) is entirely fictional, erasing several real heroes who actually existed and risked their lives to perform the rescue.

Everyone loves 300 as a movie. Gerard Butler in a loincloth shouting "This! Is! Sparta!"? Hyper-stylized battle scenes? A King of Persia who's apparently 16 feet tall and not entirely human? The Immortals? Yes, please.

But for a film explicitly based on real people and a real and extremely important historical event (the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC), its entire attitude toward historical accuracy is pretty laid-back. We hope it's not necessary to explain that the legendary Spartan warriors probably didn't go into battle wearing what are essentially loincloths and body oil — as History Vs. Hollywood explains, they most likely wore armor like every other sensible fighting force of the time.

The Guardian notes that just about every aspect of the invading Persian army is wrong, too. In the film, the Persian Emperor, Xerxes, summons warriors from all corners of his empire to throw at the Spartans. But in reality, the warriors that are shown come from much later in history — and most were never under the control of the Persian Empire, even at its largest extent (which was pretty large). Finally, the film's worst sin is positioning the Spartans as defenders of democracy and freedom. In reality, they were a society built on the exploitation of slave labor. But you wouldn't know that from the film.

There's little doubt that Winston Churchill was one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century, or that Gary Oldman's performance as the former British Prime Minister in 2018's Darkest Hour is incredibly good. Churchill was an incredibly capable leader and remains an incredibly important historical figure, but as good as it is, the film gets much of the story wrong.

First and foremost, Churchill is portrayed as a drunk, broken old man when World War II erupts. But as Antony Beevor explains in The Guardian, although he'd been pushed out of the main corridors of power, Churchill still had a lot of influence and support in the government and the Conservative Party at the time. Worse, as The Atlantic details, the pivotal scene where Churchill rides the London Underground and is convinced by a group of "ordinary" Londoners to resist Hitler to the last breath is "utterly mythical." As Beevor says dryly, the London Underground was a place the snobbish Churchill "had never set foot in his life."

The film also avoids many of Churchill's flaws — like his flagrant racism and classism — while giving credit for his brilliant leadership to a chance encounter with a bunch of anonymous citizens on a train. Churchill was many things, but none of them are on display in this otherwise gripping film.

If all your knowledge about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comes from the excellent, multiple-Oscar-winning 1984 film Amadeus, you think you know three basic facts: One, Mozart was a musical genius (true). Two, Mozart loved a good fart joke (also true). And three, Antonio Salieri hated Mozart and conducted a cruel gaslighting campaign to drive him insane and probably indirectly caused his death (almost certainly not true in any way).

It's an amazing film, but it tosses facts out the window in favor of drama. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann called the film "laughably wrong" in The Guardian. She gave the film credit for accurately portraying some of Mozart's more childish and fart-loving personality traits but noted that the whole Salieri-hated-Mozart business was fiction drummed up after both were dead by Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. She also notes that the film explicitly makes many of Mozart's later works seem like failures, when in fact they were uniformly successful, and that the whole business with Salieri dressing up like his dead father to commission the Requiem happened in a completely different, Salieri-free way.

As BBC Culture notes, Peter Shaffer (who wrote the play the film was based on) was up-front about the lack of facts in this historical story, saying, "Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film was even less of one."

Windtalkers came out in the halcyon days of 2002, when Nicolas Cage was still a bona-fide A-List movie star and not a slightly crazy B-movie icon screaming about the bees. This was a prestige film telling a story from World War II that doesn't get a lot of attention: the Navajo Windtalkers.

They really existed, and the US armed forces did, in fact, rely on Navajo code talkers during the war. As the CIA itself explains, the Navajo language was ideal because of its complexity, rarity, and lack of written form, which gave the Germans and Japanese nothing to work from. The code talkers then took it a step further by using a sort of "word association" code that further obscured the true meaning of the messages.

So far, so good, but as Seattle PI notes, it's when we get to the actual plot of the film that everything goes wrong. In the story, the code talkers are so vital to the war effort they cannot be allowed to be captured. Nic Cage stars as the PTSD-suffering soldier assigned to protect his "windtalker" at any cost — and to kill him if it looks like he's going to be captured. This is simply not true: The code talkers were certainly useful and contributed tremendously to the war effort, but the capture of a single code talker wouldn't have lost us the war, and no one was ordering summary executions on the front lines to keep them out of enemy hands.

Oliver Stone's whole aesthetic could be described as "reality-adjacent," so literally no one expected his 2004 epic historical drama Alexander to be an educational film about the man who once conquered most of the known world. But the movie is so disdainful of historical fact that it's basically a work of fiction.

As DailyHistory.org notes, Stone completely distorts just about every detail of Alexander the Great's life. The historical figures are depicted as younger than they actually were, and Stone deletes important battles from the story, combines others for no reason aside from convenience, and misrepresents how formidable Alexander's enemies were, especially the Persians. That means the film actually fails in one of its main reasons for existence: exploring the military genius of Alexander.

According to War History Online, one of the biggest problems with the film is its depiction of Alexander's sexuality. Alexander marched with his armies in the fourth century BC, so our modern-day conception of sexual orientation and morality simply didn't apply, and yet the film insists on treating his possible bisexuality as a major scandal when it almost certainly wouldn't have been. And as DailyHistory.org notes, we actually don't have enough evidence to judge Alexander's sexuality one way or another.

It's true that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare's life — there are entire periods of his life that are a complete blank. That makes it easy to just make stuff up, of course, but it's almost certain that almost nothing shown in Shakespeare in Love is true.

As reported by The Daily Collegian, the film suggests that Romeo and Juliet and several other works by the Bard were inspired by an actress Shakespeare loved. She breaks tradition (and the law) by dressing as a man to pursue her love of acting. In reality, Shakespeare's plays liberally borrowed from previous stories, reworking old plots. This was pretty common back in those days. As noted by The Guardian, this also doesn't make much sense because the film is explicitly set in 1593, and many of the works he supposedly writes weren't composed until nearly a decade later.

There's also a subtle but striking inaccuracy in that the film has exactly zero characters of color. This might seem to make sense if you're not familiar with history, but the as the BBC writes, there was actually a sizable Black population in London at the time. While you can accept there not being any people of color as main characters, not having any in the background at all is a complete history fail.

John Wayne was one of the biggest stars of all time. He also wasn't above putting his personal politics into his films, and as Yahoo! News reports, he made The Alamo as a vehicle for a certain view of American patriotism that wasn't exactly historically accurate. While the broad strokes of the Battle of the Alamo — which saw about 200 Texans fight a professional Mexican army of thousands — are true enough, Wayne made several changes that go against history.

First and foremost, it makes it look like the Texans were fighting for the American way when, in fact, they were fighting for their own claim to the land: Texas hadn't even declared independence when the battle broke out and was years away from becoming a state. Wayne wanted to show heroic Americans defending their liberty when it was actually desperate Texans fighting to keep ownership of their land.

As academic Steve Jones notes, the film's inaccuracies extend to specific historical figures, many of whom are depicted in wildly incorrect ways. One example is James Bowie, who, in reality, was too ill to fight in the battle. The film shows him valiantly battling the Mexicans despite this inconvenient fact. Davy Crockett is shown dying a spectacular, heroic death involving a mortal wound and a big explosion, but in truth, he was probably taken prisoner by the Mexicans.