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.

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.

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. 

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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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.

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. 

"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.