What to Watch | History in Movies, Part III
Back by popular demand, mostly Jon’s, is our “What to Watch” series. This time, I got to review the good ones, while Jon suffered through the bad ones. We’re also recording this one together, so expect some words of affirmation, and maybe, disgust.
Military History
Good - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
I don’t know what’s happened in Hollywood that has brought many good WW1 movies to reality, but it’s one of the few things from that industry I applaud. Based (in some fashion) on the novel, it shows a view of the war from the perspective of a German soldier. Like many who found themselves caught up in the propaganda of the Great War, the decline of the main character from the upbeat, excited young man to the hopeless, lost soldier who dies killing as many French as possible before the ceasefire is reflective of many stories from the horror of the trenches.
While not directly based on any one historical account, the author of the book served in the trenches. He, therefore, was able to construct an authoritative perspective on what it was like for a person to descend into madness. The film carries this perfectly. From the introduction of the tank to warfare to the rats to the flamethrowers to the utter hopelessness you feel with the main character, it provides a complete picture of what the war may have been like.
Never mind slasher films or tales from the dark side. Do you want horror? Watch this historical representation of what true horror is. War is hell, said Sherman. Watch this and affirm the statement.
Note: This category was a hard choice between the one I picked and 1917. Please watch both.
Bad - The Last Samurai (2003)
This film has all the ingredients of a great story. It's inspired by real events, it has swords and guns, and it's got Tom Cruise! During the late 19th century, several East Asian governments invited industrial and military experts to help them accelerate their march toward modernity. The United States sent help to China, while several European countries aided Emperor Meiji turn Japan into a powerful state on par with the West. The Last Samurai blends the lives of several of these men into a single story and is set during the last armed uprising against the Japanese government. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 ended the noble samurai class in Japan, who disliked Meiji's reforms and hoped to cling to the past. Their defeat set the Japanese on course to becoming a great power in the Pacific Rim (and, incidentially, toward conflicts with both Russia and the United States).
The story is interesting, the battle scenes and costume design are amazing, and Tom Cruise does his usual fine job of acting. But The Last Samurai fails on a number of levels. First, as is common with American films (and has been discussed before on this podcast), the screenwriters chose to emphasize American actions over those of other countries. Very few Americans worked with the Japanese on industrialization and military reforms - most of that work was done by the French and Germans. The fights between Ken Watanabe's samurai and the modern Japanese army are what we'd expect from Hollywood, but these warriors' appearance are about a century out of date. The samurai no longer wore their traditional armor for one simple reason: it slowed them down while being useless in stopping bullets. And most important from a historical point of view, the movie depicts the samurai as bravely fighting a corrupt government but ignores their many horrific abuses of defenseless peasants (a flaw also found in many stories about knights in Europe's Middle Ages). The Last Samurai is not necessarily a bad film - much like my runner-up in this category, Braveheart - but it is not great history.
Social History
Good - Far and Away (1992)
Jon is laughing at me for choosing this but I’m doubling down. This film is not strictly based on any one character or event in history, but rather does a fantastic job of showing the migration of the Irish to 19th-century America, the hardships encountered along the way, and the flight to the land grabs in the West. While the story is admittedly a bit shallow, Cruise and Kidman manage to portray the reality of what the Irish experienced during this time.
Landing in Boston, many immigrants were forced to work in labor houses and factories in an attempt to earn their way out of the city to proceed West. Many failed, but for those who succeeded the land they found was boundless and open, much to the chagrin of the native Americans who had already occupied it. The process and ongoing failures of the main characters within the film are only eclipsed by the breathtaking scene of the Oklahoma landrace that the filmmakers were able to garner through a wide lens that was groundbreaking at the time. The camera on Cruise as he rode and wove his ultra-fast horse through the masses of humans gunning for free land has stood the test of time. It is awe-inspiring.
Did I tear up seeing such a scene? Maybe. Excuse me for feeling the swell of pride in seeing historical characters in poverty suddenly find themselves on a piece of land they could call their own. Was that fulfilling the American dream? I think so.
Bad - Amadeus (1984)
I love this movie. I saw edited portions of it in elementary school and it is part of why I enjoy classical music so much. It also has one of my favorite actors, F. Murray Abraham, playing the villainous Antonio Salieri. The movie got a lot right, from the costumes and sets to Wolfgang Amadeus' tortured soul and ridiculous laugh. It also portrayed the embryos of German and Italian nationalism in an argument over which language to use in Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, as well as the nobility's fear of a coming revolution in France. There's a lot to like in this movie, but its history is flawed.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was probably not the lecherous wretch seen chasing women at a party on screen, while Salieri almost certainly was. He did commit his life and body to God like the movie shows, but he also had several opera singers as mistresses. More importantly, Mozart and Salieri were not enemies, and they may have even been friends. Surviving letters between the two include warm greetings and kind words, and Mozart invited Salieri to several openings for his operas. Of course, every good story needs a bad guy, and Abraham plays Salieri brilliantly. But unfortunately, his reputation and that of his music has suffered because of Amadeus. Some of his pieces are quite good (though Mozart's are better), and they deserve more attention than they get today.
Cultural History
Good - Dances with Wolves (1990)
Another three-hour film, Joe? You betcha. It was the 90s and people thought that film duration equaled some level of epic.
Seriously though, Dances with Wolves shows the account of a character named John Dunbar, an accidental hero in the Civil War who requests to be stationed out on the prairie before, in his words, “It’s completely gone.” The migration of the character from the battlefields of the east to the dangerous wild of the western prairie is entertaining and informative by itself. However, it’s not until we see him embrace the frontier and learn to communicate with the Lakota tribe that we get a deep sense of the character and the challenges he faces. Dunbar narrates his experiences from the perspective of his journal, where he details everything through words and illustrations. A favorite from the film is the buffalo hunt, where the audience is treated to a scene of what the herds of the big shaggies once were; literally like sand on the seashore. The score, beauty, and eeriness of the western prairie becomes more and more pronounced in the film as it goes on. For Dunbar, he is, in the end, swallowed by it in the best possible way.
It's difficult to conceptualize what life was like back then. It’s even harder to show and get buy-in from an audience regarding interest in that time period, especially now. If you make the plunge into this epic tale, prepare yourself. You will be immersed.
Bad - Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
Oh boy, talk about a disappointment. I saw the trailer for Elizabeth: The Golden Age and was so excited to see the Spanish Armada go up against the Royal Navy at the dawn of England's mastery of the seas. Then I saw the film, and I got a ridiculous love story, a confusing political scheme, and about four minutes of naval warfare. About the only accurate part of this film were the costumes - everything else is contracted for time, expanded for drama, or just plain invented by the screenwriters. Walter Raleigh never had an affair with Queen Elizabeth, and he was organizing English defenses on land during the Battle of Gravelines against the Spanish. Mary, Queen of Scots, did not speak with a Scottish accent or conspire openly with her courtiers to murder Elizabeth. The Babbington Plot conspirators never got close enough to Elizabeth to take a shot at her, and Francis Walsingham's brother did not exist and thus was not part of the plot. Building the Spanish Armada did require plenty of timber but did not strip Spain bare of trees. And King Philip II of Spain, though zealously Catholic, was more interested in protecting his treasure fleets from English pirates than deposing "the devil" Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age is also riddled with anti-Catholic imagery. Cathedrals are dark and foreboding, while the Protestant queen's chapel is light and breezy. Priests chant menacingly as the Spanish Armada departs for English shores. And crucifixes and rosaries float in burning seas after the fleet's defeat. Several Catholic friends of mine expressed disgust at these scenes, as did many Catholic film critics, especially since the shots did nothing to advance the muddled and disjointed plot of what should have been a great film.
Religious History
Good - The Mission (1986)
We’ve covered Spanish conquistadors on this podcast in the past, and this film shows you some of the horror they brought as they sought to enslave human beings. The Mission stars Robert Deniro as Rodrigo Mendoza, a slave trader who is converted to Christianity and seeks penance for his sins, both in slave trading and for a murder. The Jesuit priest, played by Jeremy Irons, convinces him to join them as they go back to the mission located in the jungles of Argentina. The penance takes the form of Mendoza carrying his armor and sword as a burden through the jungle. Initially, the natives (who know Mendoza from capturing their people) are afraid and attack him. As they walk with him and understand his remorse, they are the ones who cut his burden away and forgive him for what he has done.
The film proceeds along this storyline until other slave traders seek to attack the tribe, and Mendoza is forced to decide if his resistance – inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen 30 years later - will be active, or passive.
I chose this film because it outlines the work of the Jesuits in a way that shows the dangers they faced, while including a story that illustrates the road to redemption. You get a sense of brutality of the slave trade, the horror it brought to the world, and the heroic actions of those who stood against it.
Bad - The Da Vinci Code (2006)
In the first decade of the 21st century, we witnessed an interesting dichotomy in Western artistic circles. A certain group of religious extremists threatened, attacked, and even killed artists for daring to blaspheme their faith by showing images of their prophet, and the world was united in horror and rightly condemned these crimes. But at the same time, a writer and then a filmmaker turned another religion's savior into an unrecognizable mockery, and their peers lauded them as heroes of free speech. The Da Vinci Code is pseudo-religious garbage of the first order, but this is a history podcast, so we'll bypass that until next week (and you can send me your comments or complaints to 15minutehistorypodcast@gmail.com). The film also corrupts history to an unimaginable degree with claims that religions worshipped images that they factually did not, that men and women did things we know beyond question that they did not, and the events occurred where and when they did not. The Israelites did not worship the "sacred feminine" alongside God. Constantine did not try to merge the historical Jesus of Nazareth with Gnosticism. And the Knights Templar did not find the Holy Grail in Jerusalem and protect it for the next few centuries.
As a thriller story, The Da Vinci Code is, well, okay. I think Tom Hanks is pretty wooden as Robert Langdon, and the brilliant Audrey Tautou is entirely tree-like as Sophie Neveau. Ian McKellen does a great job as the nutty-turned-psychotic academic Leigh Teabing, but then I listened to his words. My historian's skin crawled as he warbled on about the Priory of Scion being the secret guardians of truth against the evil Catholic Church for over a thousand years. The Priory was invented in the 1950s by a disturbed French artist, while the Catholic Church, despite its flaws, had fed, housed, and educated more people than any other organization in history. Then Teabing went on to mock - nay, murder - the history of the early Church, and I knew The Da Vinci Code was top of this list.
Political History
Good - John Adams (2008 Miniseries)
Based on a 2001 book by David McCullough, this HBO series faithfully showed the story of John Adams from 1770-1826. Through a series of seven episodes, the audience is treated to the first 50 years of American history through the eyes of one of the founding fathers. Steeped in history, based in fact (kind of), the story is a masterclass is the portrayal of history in an interesting way.
Bad - Game Change (2012)
First religion, and now politics! The 2008 presidential election will always stand out in my mind - the first woman with a real shot at a major party's nomination, a car-crash Republican primary that I thought could never be topped in its divisiveness, and the election of the first African American president. All a historian and government teacher's dream! I read the book Game Change and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a (mostly) fair summary of events in the two parties' campaigns with some fascinating insights into the election that, I thought, ought to have been revealed before we went to the polls.
The Game Change movie should have brought the drama of 2008 to life, but it missed the mark entirely. The book is 23 chapters long, but the film covers only three of them. The book tells the story of four presidential campaigns: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain. The film is entirely about McCain's, and only after he won the Republican nomination (which, I thought, was the most interesting part of the book). Game Change is really about Governor Sarah Palin's role as McCain's running mate. Her time on the national stage was certainly a political game changer that, from a historian's viewpoint, prefaced the events of 2016 by almost a decade. The film highlights the very real struggles Palin endured on the campaign trail and her staffers' mostly-unsuccessful efforts to help her. But it would have you believe that a transformational and controversial woman suffered numerous meltdowns before "going rogue" while side-stepping the objectively-positive effects of her candidacy. And it completely ignores the fascinating three-way contest between a community organizer, a former first lady, and a sleazy North Carolina lawyer on the other side of the political aisle. It could have been so much better.
Alternate History
Good - Watchman (2009)
This one was a hard category to just pick one. The choices are limitless and depending on what kind of alternate history we reference, our options can literally be out of the world. With this in mind, I tried to pick a story that was as close to the real events as possible.
Set against the same historical events as ours, this timeline shows what may have happened if superheroes were real. In the story, almost every “hero” has some level of special ability, though it’s never clear if those are unique, special, or super. Instead, we are forced to believe that the heroes in the story are all somehow extraordinary. There is one exception, Dr. Manhattan, whose literal god-like powers cause massive changes in the timeline. From ending the Vietnam War in victory for the Americans within 48 hours to being THE nuclear deterrent for against the Soviet Union, the character serves as the pinnacle of power to the very end. To that end, the audience realizes that of all the heroes, there’s only actually one, and he pays for it.
This is a good movie only because of the alternate timeline. In reality, it’s kind of depressing, and though it was good filmmaking, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again. It does have strong female characters that were thankfully inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen almost a decade later, so there’s one bonus, but overall, while interesting and thought-provoking, it’s not something to watch for fun on Friday night. Also, the adult themes in the film are off the charts, so definitely not for kids.
Added Note: I know this isn’t a movie, but one of the most entertaining alternate history stories is the Hard Magic series, written by Larry Correia. Check it out.
Bad - The Hunger Games (2012)
Maybe I'm out of the mainstream on this, but I don't find movies about children killing children appealing. The Hunger Games is one of the dozens of alternate histories written for teenagers about our world being destroyed, a tyrannical government rising to power, and a strong female protagonist fighting for freedom and finding love. If you want a good alternate history, watch V for Vendetta or [Joe's choice]. Jennifer Lawrence may have been the first woman ever to star in an action film, but the poor girl can't act her way out of a cardboard box. The story is a paint-by-numbers teen drama with a forbidden love triangle and cartoonish villains straight out of the Met Gala with no depth beyond being evil, all set in a world so boring that I was hoping another nuke or plague might finish it off. Maybe the books are better and the filmmakers had to cut out all the interesting stuff. I wouldn't know; I couldn't get through the first chapter because it felt like reading a teenager's diary. Katniss Everdeen may be the "bestest girl-boss ever," but she's still killing kids.
Honorable Mentions
Good Movie I Hate - The English Patient (1996)
Great acting, sure. Pacing? Yes. Score? On point. Story? Meh.
This film won countless awards, was lauded by critics and audiences all over the world, and was talked about at every middle-class table for weeks. In my subjective, probably wrong opinion, but by the end of the film I found myself jealous of the character receiving the lethal dose of morphine. This film for me was like The Notebook, but in WW2, in a love triangle that took away from the backdrop, which in almost every scene, I cared more about.
I fully expect to be told I’m wrong. I invite the pushback. Shower me with your criticisms. I just didn’t like this and sometimes, there doesn’t have to be a reason why.
Terrible Movie I Love - Deep Blue Sea (1999)
I have a newfound respect for Joe writing two of these lists - doing just one has been depressing. So let's end with a film that is just awful but I adore: Deep Blue Sea. The story is about scientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s by harvesting tissue from sharks' brains. But then, shudder-gasp, the sharks get smart! They get loose in a flooded ocean research lab, and it's Jaws-meets-Alien. The acting is mostly dreadful. Saffron Burrows (a woman bizarrely cast in an action movie thirteen years before Jennifer Lawrence) and Thomas Jane have about as much romantic chemistry as two half-eaten fish. And the sharks look terrible, though I'd rather be eaten by one than hear Michael Rappaport's screechy voice.
So why do I love this movie, apart from watching Rappaport get eaten? Three reasons. First, the legendary Samuel L. Jackson gives hands-down the best inspirational speech in any disaster movie. Second, LL Cool J killing a shark with his kitchen oven while quoting Scripture and arguing with his pet parrot is cinema gold. And third, I have great memories of showing Deep Blue Sea to my sister for the first time. At the moment the shark jumps out of the water, I threw a rolled-up sock that hit her right in the face. She screamed to the ceiling, I fell off the couch laughing, and mom thought the house was on fire. Terrible movie, but good Streeter family memories.
