?It’s only a movie,? we probably hear often, or ?that’s just the Hollywood version.? Still, we find ourselves holding movies to be more accurate than textbooks. While films that depict historical events may tell us many facts, they also spice them up with falsehoods. And viewers don’t recognize the made-up stuff, accepting it as true.
Movies can even change our minds on facts, too. Studies show that, after reading factual historical information, then seeing a film that told false information on that same subject, viewers are more likely to believe and to recall that movie’s made-up version.
Such re-writing of history is principally found in war films, as if to make these military conflicts?justified to the public, but fallacies are also promoted on social issues, too. And in consideration of such rewritten history and social slander, there are six films that stand out most.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, is a young woman whose work as a CIA agent is devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. In the process, she indirectly participates in waterboarding on captured members of al-Qaeda. This and other torture methods lead to the CIA learning the exact whereabouts of bin Laden, which results in his final assassination. ?Zero Dark Thirty? quickly received rave reviews, many of which praised its widescreen capture of an important chapter in American history.
But the film is factually incorrect, though. Waterboarding and other torture at no time induced release of any information that aided bin Laden’s take-down. ?A wide spectrum of elected officials, ranging from Sen. Diane Feinstein on the left to Sen. John McCain on the right, joined together to criticize the film for making such a ?grossly misleading and inaccurate? insinuation. Even the CIA publicly denounced it, discrediting the film’s attribution of positive results from waterboarding. Said CIA director Michael Morell:
?The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques ? were the key to finding bin Laden. That impression is false.?
It’s also criticized for using recordings of last voicemail messages of 9/11 victims, who were giving warnings to their companies and parting messages to family.
?Zero Dark Thirty? received multiple award nominations from different film groups, and won four Golden Globes, including for Best Picture and Best Screenplay.
Taken (2008)
Here’s another torture-promoting flick. While it doesn’t exactly re-write history, ?Taken? borrows from recent news in what seems to be an attempt to justify and even promote a negative event.
Liam Neeson plays recently retired CIA agent Bryan Mills, whose daughter gets kidnapped while visiting France. Mills leaves his U.S. home to track her down, learning that she was taken for human trafficking by an Albanian crime ring.
Mills captures one participant in the trafficking network who may know where the young lady is. He ties the criminal to a chair, then stabs his legs with long metal nails to which Mills then attaches jumper cables. When the kidnapper doesn’t tell of the daughter’s location, Mills flips a light switch that begins a slow electrocution.
The scene too closely resembles the unauthorized torture tactics used by some U.S. military on Abu Ghraib detainees in 2003, however. Consider the infamous photo of one detainee standing atop a crate on a wet floor, electrical cables clipped to his fingers.
?Taken? received mixed reviews, but only for its apparent mimicry of other popular action flicks. It still managed over $226 million in worldwide ticket sales, though. The film now has two sequels (?Taken 2? and ?Taken 3?).
Monster’s Ball (2001)
Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry starred in this film that many critics praised for its negative depiction of racism, as well as its demonstration of how society is capable of overcoming and casting aside such racism. But the film only seems to continue negative racial stereotypes in society ? even sexual ones.
After suffering the suicidal loss of his son, Thornton’s Grotowski character begins to break himself away from the racial inclinations of his surroundings, becoming civil and neighborly with African Americans, and putting his overtly racist father into a nursing home. He even extends himself warmly and sympathetically to Berry’s Leticia. That’s good, right?
But Leticia is still a negative stereotype of black women ? no money, no decent job. Her husband was a criminal sentenced to death. Her son was neglected, and wound up killed by a car on the streets of her poverty-stricken urban environment. She has to be saved by the white, rural-dwelling Grotowski. And it’s hard for a film to challenge racism when it resorts to racial stereotypes itself.
The ending is even more questionable, taking such stereotypes even to a sensual level. Following a very insinuating scene (Leticia serving Grotowski chocolate ice cream, which he offers back for her to taste?from a white spoon), the film ends with implied cunnilingus between this white male and black female. This only extends a negative stereotype, and of a very personal nature ? a social typecast that black men are openly opposed to this intimacy (a racist implication of white superiority in the bedroom) and/or that black women refrain from receiving it or aren’t worthy of it (and are thus lesser than white women as sexual partners).
Berry won seven awards for the film, including Best Actress from both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards.
Witness (1985)
Harrison Ford plays Philadelphia detective John Book, who finds himself protecting a young Amish child who witnessed a murder, as well as the boy’s widowed mother. After being wounded by another policeman involved in that murder, Book winds up in hiding in the Amish community. In his recovery and stay, he witnesses the simple and honest lifestyles of Quakers, those of a traditional Christian faith who hold morality high and modern conveniences low. And, in general, the plot is exciting.
But Book comes close to rolling in the hay (literally ? like, a barn scene) with the still-young widow, who openly offers herself to him with enough nudity to give the film an R rating. And the next day, Book tells the young Rachel Lapp (played by Kelly McGillis) that she’s lucky he didn’t fully succumb to her advances.
It’s that point of ?Witness? that demeans the Amish faith, depicting its principal character and representative in the movie to be of less moral strength than Book’s tough-cop character. (It’s also rather sexist, too, to depict Rachel’s internal desires to have more influence than her faith.)
The National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom requested a public boycott for the negative connotations the film applied to its faith. ?Witness? went on to eight Academy Award nominations, though, winning Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. It grossed almost $69 million.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
This film covering a military mishap under the Clinton Administration wasn’t due for release until March 2002, but was rushed for release after 9/11, coming to theaters in Dec. 2001. And its story was so twisted from the story on which it’s based that this movie created its own battles, albeit political.
Its story is based on the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when U.S. military led a U.N.-supported intervention in Somalia. What was supposed to be a quick, peaceful mission became a combat standoff, though. Eighteen American soldiers and as many as 3,000 Somali civilians were killed. Reporter Mark Bowden of the Philadelphia Inquirer, present to cover the mission, later wrote a series of articles and even a book about it, depicting the tragedy in a human, first-person account. Bowden’s ?Black Hawk Down? became the basis of the film.
The final cut of the ?Black Hawk Down? movie seems to have only been to generate support for President Bush and his goals, though. The original script was like the book: humanistic. The final cut, though, was only brutalistic. Actor Brandon Sexton, who had a small role in the movie, stated many scenes that would have generated anti-war sentiment were cut. And as Newsweek noted in its review:
?(I)t seemed to enhance the desire of Americans for a thumping war to avenge 9/11.?
Add in the fact that director Ridley Scott acknowledged receiving $3 million in film funding from the Dept. of Defense, too, stating ?They say this as a recruitment film.?
It was panned both in and out of the United States for an inaccurate depiction of Somalis and Somali culture. Some U.S. reviewers criticized not just the film’s sentiment, but also its inaccurate blanket depiction of Middle Easterners, which may have been purposefully used to incite racist response. For example, all Somalis in the film are black, although the country’s ethnicity is dominantly Afro-Asiatic. Calling it ?racist snuff,? the Philadelphia Weekly review said:
??Black Hawk Down? often plays like ?Birth of a Nation: The Next Generation.??
When producer Jerry Bruckheimer attempted to counter those criticisms, he only cemented them; he appeared on Fox’s ?The O?Reilly Factor,? claiming the complaints only came from liberals.
The film went on to gross almost $173 million in 15 weeks, and won two Oscars in production categories.
U-571 (2000)
Before and during World War II, German military used ?Enigma?? a mathematical code for encryption ? to keep messages between units fully secret from Allied enemies. The code was eventually broken, however, after a Nazi U-boat was infiltrated and the Enigma device acquired. And the 2000 film depicted the U.S. Navy making that strategic capture.
The problem is, though, that the U.S. Navy had nothing to do with it. The British Navy captured that Enigma device, and in May 1941 ? before the U.S. even entered the war. (It wasn’t even the U-571, but the German U-110. And Enigma equipment and scripts were swiped from other Nazi craft, too.)
The inaccuracies generated quick and angry response from British Parliament and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called it an ?affront to the memories of the British sailors who lost their lives on this action.?
?U-571? was nominated for two Oscars in the technical category, winning one.
If you have suggestions for other ?politically-incorrect? films of note, be sure to offer them in comments on Liberal America’s Facebook page.
