The Most Laughably Inaccurate Historical Films

To be fair, there's no such thing as a Hollywood film that accurately depicts a historical event without any deviation. There is always going to be some kind of creative license taken on a creative project. That said, when audiences sit down to watch a movie based on true events, they are doing so with the expectation that the film is going to do its level best to follow an accurate timeline and avoid relying on untruths to tell the story.

Sometimes there are films like Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" or Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Favourite" that go out of their way (with modern color palettes, music choices, and dance sequences) to let the audience know that what they are watching is a loose, artistic interpretation of true events and that everything they're seeing should be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, that is not the case with the movies on this list.

There isn't very much that historians and archeologists know for sure about a time as far back as "10,000 BC," which is what makes it all the more incredible that this movie still manages to be laughably inaccurate. The movie depicts a time when homo sapiens were flourishing alongside prehistoric creatures like saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths, and this in and of itself isn't a complete stretch, but it becomes more far-fetched when those animals, specifically the woolly mammoth, play a role in the film as the lead character's quarry. Also, there definitely were not any gigantic, carnivorous birds still in existence by 10,000 BCE.

The film's more egregious errors come from its depiction of the state of human development. The movie shows man-made pyramid structures, a written and standardized form of language, and the use of agriculture to produce food — there is no evidence to indicate that those early seeds of civilization existed at that time of the film's ostensible setting. The earliest time that homo sapiens began to form urbanized civilizations was around 2,500 BCE with the ascension of ancient Mesopotamia. As well, the absolute earliest that humans began to utilize agricultural techniques was 9,400 BCE, and that's being generous.  Throw in the iron tools used throughout the film and you have one of the most anachronistic historical epics ever brought to the big screen.

Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" is a widely lauded film and a critical and commercial success. It won best picture at the Academy Awards in 2000 and was the second most profitable film at the box office that same year. It would be easy for a viewer to see "Gladiator" and believe that it's mostly based on truth and historical fact given that several of its central characters — i.e. Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Lucilla — all existed in real life. Unfortunately, it takes many liberties with those characters and their lives. Oh, and it also rewrites the course of ancient Roman history. 

The film's protagonist, Maximus was not a real person, though he shared some similarities with a few different figures that lived at the time as well as prior cinematic representations of Roman heroes (i.e. Spartacus). It's also very unlikely that Commodus, the film's disturbing antagonist, killed his father, Marcus Aurelius. By the time Aurelius died in 180 CE (most likely of disease), he had already named his son co-emperor of Rome. 

There are dozens of other things that "Gladiator" gets wrong about its central figures, but the most egregious change the movie makes is in its return of Rome from an empire to a republic. Aurelius tells Maximus that he wants to return power to the people, and at the end of the movie Maximus accomplishes this goal by killing Commodus in the ring ... but Aurelius never actually wanted that. Rome remained an empire until its famed fall.

It's too bad that the first film that comes to the minds of many when asked to name a movie set in Scotland would be the 1995 action epic "Braveheart." Directed by and starring Mel Gibson, "Braveheart" takes a lot of liberties with Scottish history and prioritizes what is considered stereotypically Scottish over what would have been era-appropriate. 

The film's protagonist, William Wallace, was definitely a real person who led a failed rebellion. It would make sense if he was also known as Braveheart, but that nickname actually belongs to another character in the movie, King Robert the Bruce (who, by the way, didn't betray Wallace in real life). Speaking of Wallace, he was not a farmer. William Wallace was a lowlander nobleman. The murder of his wife — which did really happen — was a major instigating incident in his rebellion against the British, but it wasn't his only motivation.

The film ignores many of the other people in Scotland and around Wallace who contributed to the rebellion's success and Queen Isabella and Wallace definitely did not have a love connection. Kilts were not yet a traditional Scottish fashion choice and the rebels didn't wear blue face paint, though the Picti — a population that inhabited part of Scotland about 1,000 years before Wallace — did wear face paint when they fought the Romans. One thing the movie actually gets right, though, is that Wallace and the rebels did innovate the usage of giant spears in their fight against the British.

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" sorts its characters into two categories: noble savages (including the film's protagonist, Jaguar Paw) and bloodthirsty barbarians. The Mayans were a sophisticated, highly advanced society of complex societal structures, culture, and religious practices, and Gibson fails to portray this.

For one thing, Jaguar Paw and his fellow jungle villagers would not have been completely ignorant of the Mayan pyramids and urban centers that existed throughout the region. He lives within a few days' walk of a bustling metropolitan area, and yet appears awe-struck when he is marched to the temple for the forthcoming mass human sacrifice. Oh yeah, that's another thing — there's archeological evidence indicating that the ancient Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale, but not the Mayans. Their religious ceremonies did, at times, involve human sacrifice, but mostly in cases where the one sacrificed person was a high-ranking prisoner.

Part of what makes these more substantial errors so insidious is that they're dressed up in cosmetic accuracy. All of the actors in the film are Indigenous-Mexican and they speak modern-day version of the Mayan language (Yucatec Mayan). The garb and architecture are also accurate, if not all from the same time period. But Mel Gibson is frequently accused of racism and antisemitism and pushes a pretty clear religious agenda in his filmmaking. The Spanish conquistadors arriving on South American shores toward the end of the movie, flanked by Catholic crosses, are framed as deliverance for the Mayans from their savagery ... as if they had it coming. 

Instead of "Pocahontas," Disney would have been better off making up a different story. It would certainly have aged better than an attempt to romanticize what was actually a very grim life. John Smith and Pocahontas both existed and they probably did encounter each other but Pocahontas was no older than 12 at the time. 

Later, during her mid-teens, Pocahontas (who was a married mother at that point) was kidnapped and held as a prisoner of war at the Jamestown colony as a tactic to force her father, the Chief of the Powhatan nation, into a peace treaty with the English settlers. Pocahontas was sexually assaulted in captivity, forced to convert to Christianity, then married to a colonist named John Rolfe. By the time Pocahontas and Rolfe had boarded the ship to England, she had given birth to another son and her first husband had been murdered by the colonists.

After living in England with her husband for a few years — used as a prop in the king's court to appease the people of England who were horrified by the atrocities committed against the Native people in America — Pocahontas was set to return to Virginia, only to die quickly and painfully from an undetermined illness: possibly tuberculosis or pneumonia. Her body was not returned home to be buried by her tribe.

So yeah, Pocahontas didn't fall in love with a handsome, age-appropriate English settler. She also didn't have a pet raccoon or a talking willow tree, but hopefully we're not breaking that news to you.

The last of our Mel Gibson-affiliated quadruplet of entries is "The Patriot." Directed by Roland Emmerich (another fellow that features heavily in this article) and released in 2000, "The Patriot" venerates America and its early citizens to a point of absurdity. The film is set in South Carolina and follows Benjamin Martin (Gibson) as he almost singlehandedly defeats the sadistic British Redcoats that have come to inflict violence and terror on an otherwise peaceful and idyllic colony.

Let's set aside the fact that the film was originally meant to be a more specific biopic about a man named Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion until the folks developing the story learned that he was actually a sadist who killed Indigenous people for fun and sexually assaulted his slaves. "The Patriot" is still completely inaccurate in its depiction of the political and societal climate in America at the time of the Revolutionary War.

Martin employs many freed slaves who are apparently totally safe from capture until the Redcoats waltz in. Basically, everything that goes wrong in the American colonies, according to "The Patriot," can be traced back to the inherent evil of the British. At one point, the British soldiers are shown forcing an entire town filled with women, children, and elderly into a locked church and then setting it on fire. This never happened, and the film's refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of American colonists is most of what makes this movie so ridiculous. 

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In the words of Jonathan Dresner, an East Asian history professor at Pittsburg State University, Kansas, "From the opening voiceover and title to the final scene, 'The Last Samurai' is a historical disaster." 

Tom Cruise plays a character named Nathan Algren (who was probably a composite of a few different people), a Civil War veteran who is hired to train Japanese soldiers to fight a rebellion of Samurai who refuse to embrace industrialization. Algren, of course, ends up a prisoner-turned-honorary member of the Samurai after learning about their combat and way of life. The Samurai class of Japan was made up of more than a million people before the changes enacted during Japan's Meiji era, and many of them did choose to assimilate to new ways of living.

The Samurai who didn't want to assimilate and rebelled didn't do so because they feared the evils of modernization, but rather because they didn't want to lose the specialized privileges and duties they retained because of their status. The film bases its war on the Satsuma rebellion of 1877, but in that rebellion the Samurai seized armories and readily made use of modern arms. 

Furthermore, many of the aristocrats depicted in the movie were of the Samurai class and most of the Samurai were living in more urbanized areas by the late 1800s. The film's romanticization and over-simplification of what was actually a complex faction made up of many different clans and interests is cringeworthy.

Because "The Greatest Showman" is a musical, we understand that historical accuracy is not one of its highest priorities. The point of musicals is to give audiences an exciting spectacle and write any sentiments that feel too corny to deliver without instrumental backing into song. Viewers are supposed to marvel at talented dancers and impressive costumes, and "The Greatest Showman" certainly succeeds in meeting all of these requirements. But couldn't they have just made up a circus story instead of hinging everything on the historical legacy of a man like P.T. Barnum?

Barnum was not a good person. It is true that he ran a circus and ... existed. Otherwise, this movie depicts a man who is actually the complete opposite of Barnum in every way that two people can differ philosophically. Hugh Jackman's Barnum is intent on giving his "freaks" a safe place to be themselves and retain their own agency. In real life, P.T. Barnum regularly exploited marginalized people to make money for himself. He kidnapped people of color, many of whom were Indigenous people, and even made money off displaying their corpses after their deaths.

It's actually horrific to read from different sources about the things he did to people like Joice Heth and Chang and Eng Bunker, among many others, and the fact that they released a musical glorifying him in the year 2017 is almost unbelievable. Barnum himself would be impressed by such an egregious spin.

"The Imitation Game" is another movie that both audiences and critics received quite favorably thanks in large part to Benedict Cumberbatch's compelling performance as Alan Turing, a real-life mathematician whose invention — now known as the Universal Turing Machine — cracked the Germans' nigh-indecipherable war code known as Enigma during World War II. 

In the movie and in real-life, Turing was homosexual and closeted. In the film, he is closeted to a point where he seems to be totally emotionally stilted; he even names his code-breaking machine after his childhood love, Christopher. Keira Knightley plays Turing's associate Joan Clarke who is engaged to him for a time in the movie. This happened in real-life as well, but Turing actually disclosed to her right away that he was gay and she didn't bat an eye. In the movie, Clarke doesn't disregard Turing because of his sexuality, but its reveal to her is definitely played to much greater dramatic effect.

The biggest change the film makes to Turing's life is to put John Cairncross on his team. Cairncross was a real person who worked as a spy for the Soviets. Turing and Cairncross were both working at Bletchley Park at the same time, but they were on different teams and didn't meet due to security precautions. In the movie, Cairncross successfully blackmails Turing, threatening to reveal his sexuality should Turing out him as a spy. It's a huge leap that Turing would have allowed a Soviet spy to continue unchecked in order to protect his own secret.

This list wouldn't be complete without one of the most immediately hated World War II movies ever made — "Pearl Harbor." "Directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer" is a sentence clause that should automatically provide some clue as to why "Pearl Harbor" was such a disaster. Bay and Bruckheimer are known for their big-budget action movies that usually feel like excuses to see how many explosions they can fit into 120 minutes; therefore, they're not the ideal people to bring to life an onscreen adaptation of a very real and memorialized tragedy in American history.

There are too many anachronistic uses of technology and various inventions in the film to enumerate — from characters smoking Marlboro Lights (a cigarette that didn't exist until the 1970s) to a far-too advanced depiction of radio communication in one scene as a few soldiers silently monitor the situation from far away and across several different aircraft. 

More substantially, the movie depicts Japanese fighters targeting a civilian hospital despite the fact that, in real life, they were instructed to refrain from attacking civilian targets and only one member of nearby medical personnel died that day attempting to cross the navy yard. There were times throughout the attack when Japanese soldiers specifically ceased fire in order to avoid civilian targets (which was both because they didn't want to aim for civilians and also because they wanted to preserve ammunition) and this has been corroborated by both Japanese and American vets. 

Another World War II movie — Hollywood loves its World War II movies — is "Enemy at the Gates" starring Jude Law as a man named Vassili Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a sharpshooter in the Russian army who lived and excelled in his field with over 240 confirmed kills throughout his service (with some sources estimating that his personal body count could be considerably higher). Zaitsev was a hero of the Battle of Stalingrad and an important figure in Soviet propaganda, but it's highly unlikely that he ever engaged in a climactic feud with an evil German counterpart. 

In the movie Zaitsev is discovered as an inherently talented shooter and trained to be pitted against prodigious Nazi sniper Major König. The film culminates in a high-pressure showdown between Zaitsev and Konig wherein Zaitsev finally gets the upper-hand thanks to a sacrifice from his friend and romantic rival Danilov. In real life, there is no evidence of a hyper-competent German sniper named König. 

When "Enemy at the Gates" came out in 2001, many Russian war veterans actually took issue with the film's depiction of the Red Army. The film depicts the commanders and officers of the army as sadistic and merciless and its foot soldiers as nothing more than cannon fodder. The Red Army did struggle against German forces before turning the tide at Stalingrad, but they were never so pressed for materials that they sent soldiers into battle with ammunition but no weapons or vice versa. Many Russian soldiers fought bravely to defend their country during WWII, just like the rest of the Allied Powers. 

"Stonewall" follows a character named Danny. Danny is a young, gay man exploring his sexuality. There's not too much about this fictional person's private life that can be called incorrect. Unfortunately, the movie sets Danny's story against the backdrop of 1969 New York City and the monumental Stonewall riots that are an essential part of LGBTQIA+ history, and that is where things start to get problematic.

When the trailer for the film dropped in August 2015, "Stonewall" received a ton of pushback from various historians, critics, and LGBTQIA+ groups, including many people who were actually at Stonewall Inn in the '60s. The riots were mostly led by queer and trans men and women of color, including notable activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Director Roland Emmerich and writer Jon Robin Baitz — two gay, cis, white men – centered their film on a character that looked a lot more like themselves than the majority of the people who were involved in the Stonewall riots.

"Stonewall" includes a few characters that are POC and gender-queer, but they all take a far-back seat to Danny. The police frequently raided the Stonewall Inn, brutalizing and arresting its patrons, and it was young trans people, sex workers, queer people of color, and other folks who dealt with multiple intersections of marginalization who suffered the most. The Dannys of the world didn't throw the first bricks at Stonewall, and it's unforgivable that this movie would have audiences think so.