Do you downgrade a rating due to historical inaccuracies?

[philamental]

Apologies if this is a topic has already been discussed at length. Also there are mild spoilers ahead for the film 'Frost/Nixon'.

I watched Frost/Nixon last night. I knew of the real life title characters, a basic outline of the plot and that the acting had been praised but I didn't know what to expect otherwise. It turned out to be quite enjoyable, with the events leading up to the interviews to be more compelling than I had anticipated, so I rated it T6. There was one scene towards the end where Nixon phones Frost in the middle of night while drunk. It was a meaty scene cranking up the tension ahead of the final crucial interview session, but I couldn't help feeling it may have been a dramatic fabrication that never happened, so I decided to do some research to find out.

What I found out was while that scene was indeed fabricated, so were many of the events depicted in the final interview which is the dramatic climax of the entire film. While I could have happily accepted the phone call scene being a dramatic fabrication, the fact these interviews were broadcast to the world yet they weren't accurately depicted in the film left a really bad taste in my mouth and I've been seriously considering changing my rating as a result.

However, Frost/Nixon is not a documentary. It's a drama. It's aim is to entertain not be factually accurate. In that sense it achieved it's purpose because I enjoyed it. From that perspective it seems I should rate the film based on it's cinematic merits alone and let my original rating stand. However, if I had happened to know the accurate details of the events the film is based on beforehand, I believe I would have been appalled by the dramatic licence taken so the film would not have entertained me and I'd have rated the film a lot lower. As a result I'm leaning significantly towards re-rating although I haven't made a final decision yet.

I guess I'm curious what others have done in the situations where they find a film historically inaccurate either as they watch it the first time or through further research afterwards, and how that affects their ratings. Is anyone happy to completely separate a film from it's source material and judge it purely on it's artistic merits? I don't believe I can but I'd be interested in reading other opinions on this

[MacSwell]

I do tend to do this - I realise that historical films will always use artistic licence for the sake of entertainment, but some take it too far.

For me, U-571 is the worth offender. I hate it. Don't remember it well enough to give it a rating on here, but it'd be a Tier 1 film for sure.

Braveheart is also pretty terrible when it comes to accuracy, and certain things I can't forgive, like Robert the Bruce (my favourite Scottish hero) betraying Wallace. It's still a good movie on the whole though.

Upon first viewing, the part in Inglourious Basterds where Hitler and Goebbels were shot to pieces kinda bugged me. Upon second viewing, I took the film far more light-heartedly (as it is essentially a black comedy) and didn't mind the historical changes at all. In fact, I thought they added to the experience.

I guess it just depends upon the film.

[VinegarBob]

Sometimes, but as with a lot of things in life the real answer is 'it depends'. It's a tricky business sorting fact from fiction, and someone of a pedantic persuasion could probably have a field day on a forum like this with the inconsistency of thinking that sometimes arises due to the conflict between style and substance in mainstream movies.

This is a topic that's intrigued me for years. My view is that there's always some embellishment to a 'true story' for the purposes of adding more intrigue/suspense/entertainment - and generally more so the closer it is to the mainstream - it's just a matter of degree. When it strays too far off well-known events someone familiar with those real events will balk at a film and tune out, while someone unfamiliar is more likely to accept things, and enjoy it (everything else being equal). Ignorance is bliss, as they say - and Hollywood is all too aware of this.

Having seen a truckload of films my philosophy now is, 'don't bother me with that based on a true story nonsense, because at this point it's meaningless'. I try to take every film as a work of fiction whether it's supposed to be or not, and work from there. I believe if you can do that you're apt to enjoy the average film more, so the less you know about any real events surrounding a films subject matter the better. As a general rule if you want to know what really happened regarding some event that took place in real life then you should watch a documentary or read a book/article or whatever about it, and not a dramatic film. There are exceptions to every rule though.

Take Oliver Stone's JFK. That's a tier 10 film for me, even though I know that the veracity of a lot of the claims he makes in the film are....questionable. However, everything about that film from a technical standpoint is phenomenal, so it would be a shame to let the fact that some liberties with the truth have been taken spoil my enjoyment of it. I just assume it's only a movie - one guy (Oliver Stone's) take on things that happened when he wasn't around to witness them first hand.

The really good films find a way to stay truthful to reality while taking small liberties with the details in order to provide more drama, and doing so within the framework of their own design and the facts of the events as a whole. While I didn't care much for Frost/Nixon that was mostly due to factors other than its verisimilitude - I'm not familiar enough with the facts surrounding the event to know exactly how it all went in real life. I think it would have bugged me though if, like philamental I had found out the extent to which they'd jimmied with things, and I probably would downgrade my rating.

Here's a good example of downgrading your rating based on finding out how much they twisted the truth:



Now I'd rate that a 100!

But when you find out it's been photoshopped and someone proves it by showing you the real horse:



My rating drops down to 0. What a bummer.

[dardan]

Only if it changes the meaning of what it portrays. In ancient times descriptions of people weren't given on the basis of a set of facts and a minimum amount of synthesis between them like the case is now, but rather stories were made up like '... bob then went on to give a homeless person 10 dollars'. He might not have done that, but he could have, and it is an apt description of the character of Bob. Similarly I only downgrade ratings if films could have focussed on an actual fact with the same effect, but unnecessarily decided not to do so.

Then there are films I don't downgrade for historical inaccuracies if they are part of what makes them so interesting (Birth of a nation, 1915).

The only films I downgrade strongly are those who distort meaning with negative societal effects as a result (Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper). In The Wolf of Wall Street I wasn't pleased with it being a commercial mass-audience directed film, as it caused thousands upon thousands of young males going to the expensive speeches of psychopath criminal Belfort, who got his fame, wealth and notoriety reinstated as a result, let alone the thousands of others who didn't go to his speeches but were inspired nonetheless.

It also depends on the main story being told. If the main story is watergate from a political perspective, then I care less about inaccuracies in the depiction of the two reporters. If the intent of the director is to make a tragic tale and uses the life of a tragic person to do so, then my main focus will be how successful the director was in accurately depicting a tragic tale.

[TheDenizen]

There has never been a historical film that is 100% historically accurate.

Even most documentaries will bend the facts to fit the narrative they want to present. I remember some people getting all huffy about the Hitler scene in Inglourious Basterds and laughing my ass off at them, as they had clearly and entirely missed the point.

It's one thing to note (and laugh at) some anachronisms or inaccuracies in a film, but to judge its merit as entertainment based on its slavish adherence to the facts seems misguided at best.

[Stewball]

Apologies if this is a topic has already been discussed at length. Also there are mild spoilers ahead for the film 'Frost/Nixon'.

I watched Frost/Nixon last night. I knew of the real life title characters, a basic outline of the plot and that the acting had been praised but I didn't know what to expect otherwise. It turned out to be quite enjoyable, with the events leading up to the interviews to be more compelling than I had anticipated, so I rated it T6. There was one scene towards the end where Nixon phones Frost in the middle of night while drunk. It was a meaty scene cranking up the tension ahead of the final crucial interview session, but I couldn't help feeling it may have been a dramatic fabrication that never happened, so I decided to do some research to find out.

What I found out was while that scene was indeed fabricated, so were many of the events depicted in the final interview which is the dramatic climax of the entire film. While I could have happily accepted the phone call scene being a dramatic fabrication, the fact these interviews were broadcast to the world yet they weren't accurately depicted in the film left a really bad taste in my mouth and I've been seriously considering changing my rating as a result.

However, Frost/Nixon is not a documentary. It's a drama. It's aim is to entertain not be factually accurate. In that sense it achieved it's purpose because I enjoyed it. From that perspective it seems I should rate the film based on it's cinematic merits alone and let my original rating stand. However, if I had happened to know the accurate details of the events the film is based on beforehand, I believe I would have been appalled by the dramatic licence taken so the film would not have entertained me and I'd have rated the film a lot lower. As a result I'm leaning significantly towards re-rating although I haven't made a final decision yet.

I guess I'm curious what others have done in the situations where they find a film historically inaccurate either as they watch it the first time or through further research afterwards, and how that affects their ratings. Is anyone happy to completely separate a film from it's source material and judge it purely on it's artistic merits? I don't believe I can but I'd be interested in reading other opinions on this

There's a fine line to artistic license. If a movie changes the import of an historical event, it can only be termed as an attempt to rewrite history (Frost v Nixon), or outright lie (An Inconvenient Truth), in which case I definitely dock it depending on the seriousness of the fallacious redaction. The Finest Hours appears to adhere very well to actual events, meddling only with some of the romantic details. Then movies like 13 Hours and especially The Big Short, tell the truth but not the whole truth, which is often worse that lying outright.

[Anomaly]

If events are changed for (what seems to me) no reason, it can sometimes leave a sour note in my experience of the film. But as long as the spirit of what happened is captured, the fine details aren't very important, and it will almost never compel me to alter my score. Maybe I'll just make a note of it in my review or whatever.

Also I agree the "Based on a true story" thing needs to die already.

[CMonster]

I guess it just depends upon the film.

This is all that needs to be said.

[BillyShears]

That part where Schindler's ipad reset and the list was lost made me

[td888]

Normally I don't care too much about (little) historical inaccuracies, but the one movie that comes to my mind that I rated T1 because of this was Another Earth. Part of its premise was about the first human (Gagarin) spending a month in orbits around earth. He was indeed the first human in space, but only for one orbit.