7 ‘Historical’ Movies That Got It Wrong

Anonymous (2011)

There are a lot of good reasons to watch a Roland Emmerich movie, but historical accuracy isn’t one of them. The director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Moonfall (in which the moon literally falls out of the sky) is among our finest purveyors of high-concept popcorn flicks, but a historian he is not. That made him a strange choice to helm a movie like Anonymous, which promotes the long-discredited theory that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. It instead posits that one Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, did, with Rhys Ifans playing the courtier who secretly moonlights as a literary genius. In addition to its central premise being bogus, the movie gets so many other basic historical details wrong that its Wikipedia page has an entire subchapter devoted to “Other departures from fact.”

Braveheart (1995)

Does the “Freedom!” scene still get the pulse going? Absolutely. Did it actually happen? Almost certainly not. The same can be said of pretty much everything else in Braveheart, which Mel Gibson both directed and starred in as Scottish folk hero William Wallace. The movie is wildly, famously inaccurate, beginning with its name: Wallace was not known as Braveheart; that nickname belonged either to King Robert the Bruce or to no one at all. The belted plaid, kilts, and blue face paint aren’t based on anything factual either, nor were several of the battle sequences.

Elizabeth Ewan, who teaches Scottish studies and history at the University of Guelph, has said that the movie “almost totally sacrifices historical accuracy for epic adventure.” Sharon L. Krossa, an expert on medieval Scotland, was even more blunt: “The events aren’t accurate, the dates aren’t accurate, the characters aren’t accurate, the names aren’t accurate, the clothes aren’t accurate — in short, just about nothing is accurate.” The general public didn’t appear to care in the least. Braveheart spent nine consecutive weeks atop the box office on its way to earning $213 million worldwide, won four Oscars (including Best Picture and Best Director), and led to an increase in Scottish tourism.

The Last Samurai (2003)

In a nice bit of intertextuality, one of The Last Samurai’s key scenes refers to the same ancient battle that inspired 300 — inaccurate movies think alike, it seems. Jonathan Dresner, an expert in East Asian history, penned an article describing the film as a “historical disaster” — a fair assessment of a movie positing that the last survivor of Japan’s legendary warrior caste was not a native samurai but rather a disenchanted Civil War veteran played by Tom Cruise. While acknowledging that “some of the background to the story is reasonably true to life,” Dresner pointed out that “almost everything else” is wrong. That didn’t prevent Edward Zwick’s admittedly effective historical epic from earning $455 million at the box office and four Academy Award nominations, however. 

The Patriot (2000)

Bringing together two masters of historical inaccuracy in director Roland Emmerich and star Mel Gibson, The Patriot is uniquely off the mark in its depiction of the Revolutionary War. In a review of the movie, The Telegraph opined that “truth is [the] first casualty in Hollywood’s war.” Indeed, the film exaggerates the extent of British soldiers’ cruelty (no, they never locked women and children in a church before setting it on fire) and neglects to mention that the real-life figure who most inspired its protagonist was an enslaver. Among its fiercest critics was Spike Lee, who wrote in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter that “for three hours, The Patriot dodged around, skirted about, or completely ignored slavery.” He also called it “pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda” and “a complete whitewashing of history.”

Pearl Harbor (2001)

“I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark / When he made Pearl Harbor,” goes one of Team America’s catchiest songs. Historical inaccuracy is only part of the song’s issue with Bay’s poorly received epic, but it’s an important one. There are exhaustive lists of every error and anachronism in Pearl Harbor, which is infamous for getting just about everything wrong — including basic storytelling. Writing for the Society of Military History, Evan Sarantakes decided it was simpler to list what the movie got right: “There was a U.S. naval base in Hawaii, it was called Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did attack with planes on December 7.”

Pocahontas (1995)

There is precisely zero evidence that Pocahontas and John Smith (who was at least 17 years her senior) were ever in a romantic relationship, as portrayed in the 1995 animated Disney film about this influential Powhatan woman. Pocahontas did marry an English colonist, but his name was John Rolfe. (In a coincidence, Christian Bale, who played Rolfe in Terrence Malick’s The New World, also voiced a character in Disney’s Pocahontas.) There’s also the fact that the title heroine’s real name was Amonute, whereas Pocahontas was merely a nickname meaning something like “little wanton” or “playful one.” Roger Ebert wasn’t impressed by these deviations: “Having led one of the most interesting lives imaginable,” he wrote in his review of the Disney film,” Pocahontas serves here more as a simplified symbol.”

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