Amph How do you prefer your historical movies from the Midle Ages?

History + Fantasy rules.

 

Senator, I served with Bill Shakespeare. I knew Bill Shakespeare. Bill Shakespeare was a friend of mine. Ridley Scott is no Shakespeare.

That is, I would probably overlook it if KoH were any good (yeah, I've only seen the director's cut). Plus, I'd rather not apply Elizabethan sensibilities to the 21st century. I suppose you'd also forgive someone making a horribly anti-Semitic film 'cause Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice?

 

Ah yes, the homoerotic King of Sparta vs the BDSM festishistic King of Persia. Very accurate.

 

I also like all my movies about the Middle Ages to look like "The Name of the Rose."

 

I want Sean Connery and Russel Crowe in every single Middle Ages movie.

 

Let's also have Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons. They also make things better, right?

 

I haven't seen Jeremy Irons in a good movie in forever!

 

I love that book! And I'd be all for this. Have you seen The Tudors? Thats stretching the Middle Ages and hitting the Renaissance but it's good nonetheless.

For someone who loved the MIddle Ages, I haven't actually seen KOH or Braveheart. I heard a Scot absolutely go off about how inaccurate Braveheart is, though.

 

At least Snyder was smart enough to subvert the entire "historical inaccuracy" thing by saying to critics afterwards that Dilios is an Unreliable Narrator. The framing device of Dilios telling the men around him a good story to raise their morale ahead of Plataea is an effective one storywise, if only because it makes the more fantastic elements of the story much more palatable.

 

Even is a Jaopanese movie about samurai's?

 

Peasant rebellions occurred, but they tended to be anti-aristocratic, not anti-monarchical; they certainly would not have been joined by barons. They also occurred primarily in later centuries. They revolted against perceived oppression by their noble landlords and generally petitioned the king for redress of their grievances rather than rejecting the authority of a monarch to govern them, as portrayed here. Egalitarian movements such as the Levellers and Diggers were features of several centuries later, and even the slightly more proximate Wat Tyler revolt (only about a hundred fifty years later) was anti-aristocratic and involved oaths of loyalty to the king, who was portrayed as suffering from bad counsel from evil ministers. Even the William Fitz Osbert revolt, occurring in the actual time period depicted in the film, was staged against the urban rich but refused to attack the monarchy. It was quickly suppressed and treated as an extremely rare incident for the time period.

"But things vaguely like the events depicted sometimes occurred" does not establish historical accuracy when everything around the pseudo-plausible events is being distorted for Hollywood purposes. The issue is that actual historical views, ideas, and motivations are being discarded to present a hero who mouths post-Enlightenment sentiments about government and society that a modern audience can feel good about, regardless of how anachronistic and out-of-place they are in the setting. It's silly and patronizing. The distinction between Magna Carta as a document forced upon the king by barons seeking to defend their rights and property and create new rights against royal interference -- an intra-aristocracy power struggle -- and Maga Carta as a document symbolic of a universal English affirmation of citizenship rights and rebuke of the monarchical system may be subtle, but it is significant, seeing as the difference is oh, about five hundred years of history.

 

No, I'm just saying that artist's recontextualizing and modernizing the personalities of their characters, historical or otherwise, in order to fit the styles of the times and the demands of their own dramatic structure and thematic intent is a thing that's been going on forever, and which shouldn't be a source of automatic negative judgement. I don't know if it's because movies appear to depict things as "Real" but people seem t demand veracity in that medium more than in any other and it's honestly frustrating. I mean, unless you want Kingdom of Heaven to be a three hour trip down a dusty road populated hypocritical rapists.

 

It isn't.

It's a function of the deliberate choices made in Kingdom of Heaven. They, like many American-made period pieces, stressed the "based on a true story" element. People reacted with understandable and appropriate frustration when it was in fact wildly off base.

Contrast that with something like Hero (or, really, any of the major crossover wuxia hits). It's pretty improbable that Qin Shi Huang's purpose was as noble as the one ascribed to him. Less so that a peasant would have had such a grand philosophical treatise about the whole thing, or that he would have ever have been so embraced by an aristocrat in a period well before the birth of the meritocratic imperial exam system. More than all this, we know the actual event in question was two middle aged, probably out of shape idiots chasing each other comically around a single pillar. Even excepting all the fantastical martial arts superpowers, the entire thing is outside what was even remotely plausible.

Yet that movie was much better received. Why? As Even suggested, the difference in quality does have something to do with it. But I would also argue that while they highlighted it as a period tale, the film was not presented as strictly "historical" in the same way that efforts like Kingdom of Heaven were. And when the Emperor (echoing Sky) mounts his defense of the incredible costs of Chinese communism, he does so in a way that is at least still appropriate within the world the movie set up, and which has immediacy to that situation. Whereas Scott was so ham-fisted that the equivalent would've been to make Jet Li stare directly into the camera and yell in unison "OBEY HU JINTAO."

 

Should I bring up that the "based on a true story" thing is just . . . I mean, Fargo pulled a "based on true events" thing and it just wasn't in any way whatsoever; it was just a pure fiction. Saying it's based on a true story has become nothing more than an artistic choice; there's no sense anymore that the statement is factual.

 

Many horror movies use the "based on a true story/real events" tag despite being totally made-up most of the time.

 

I believe those are the ones that use "Inspired by a true story."