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Fwiw, some random reading for your consumption.
"It is not Hollywood’s job to educate you. If you did not pay attention in history class, don’t expect Ben Affleck to save you with a jaunty, factual refresher on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into World War II. If you’re expecting to watch the 2001 Affleck and Josh Hartnett vehicle Pearl Harbor and learn all you’d need to know to ace a quiz on that day which will live in infamy, you will be in line for an F. If you want facts, go watch PBS. If you want “facts” then, by all means, let Michael Bay spin you a yarn."
The problem with the phrase ‘based on a true story,’ is it's an extremely loaded claim. On its own, it kind of gives license to almost anything. It’s not quite as bad as its cousin ‘inspired by real events,’ but ‘based on a true story’ implies there has to be some adherence to a commonly recognized reality, but with flexibility. That doesn’t necessarily mean movies that take liberties with the real events they’re based on have to be bad, though. This is entertainment, after all. Not education.
One of the main problematic elements in Pearl Harbor for example, is attributing acts that amount to war crimes to combatants on the opposing side of the Americans. The Japanese, in fact, did not actually target medical staff and the base hospital during the attack.
It also falls into a mode of attributing real-life heroics to fictional characters. Namely, Affleck and Hartnett’s characters’ actions during the Japanese attack follow pretty closely to those taken by second lieutenants George Welch and Kenneth Taylor. But nothing else about Hartnett and Affleck’s characters came even close to the truth about Taylor and Welch. Taylor called the film “a piece of trash … over-sensationalized and distorted,” according to his son.
Those looking to “true story” films as their only source of historical knowledge will be misinformed. The key is to use these movies as jumping-off points from which to learn more about the truth behind the story the movie is conveying. We set ourselves up to be disappointed if we expect a movie to be like a nonfiction book, and it would actually rule out some movies that are particularly insightful in other ways. They may contain fanciful elements, things that are made up, but they also may have other things that are insightful or get us to think about a really important historical issue that goes beyond whether one detail is true or not.
Hollywood is not a classroom. The problem, however, is that movies, despite the bonfires of distortion in many of them, can shape our understanding of historical and political events just as much as think tank reports or Pulitzer-winning books. For instance, a lot of major movies are taught in schools. It is disingenuous for the screening room cognoscenti to pretend that films are of no historical or political consequence and shouldn’t be critiqued for historical accuracy — and that’s particularly true for war films.
Filmmakers can always deflect criticism by saying ‘It’s a movie, not a documentary,’ which is true. But that ignores the reality of how it will be consumed by the general public, especially the younger generations who are easily influenced. There is another problem with the “calm down it’s just a movie” attitude and that can be what is fact and what isn’t is not always easy to tell.
By all means, let movies engage history — this is a wonderful thing — but their narratives of facts vs fiction and realistic violence vs over-the top violence should not be spared a confrontation with the truth."
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America ... explain how you are NOT Racist, you'll except tyranny from a white man, but you won't take health care from a black man.
... Foolish, foolish foolish!!!.
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