Hollywood produces fiction. Nothing presented in movies can be taken as representative of facts or reality. Even (or especially) if the movie is historical or "based on a true story".

▲

triceratops 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To add on: this is how history has mostly always been transmitted to the masses. Plays and ballads and folk tales and other entertainment. History as serious study has normally been an elitist (I mean that descriptively, not pejoratively) pursuit.

▲

SoftTalker 10 hours ago | parent [-]

And even then, everyone else is pretty much just stuck with wondering who to believe. Nobody has time to do their own research to that depth, and nobody is around to give any first-hand accounts. Everything we know about the past is a story told from a partiular point of view, supported by cherry-picked artifacts, with varying agendas behind it.

	▲	bluGill 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Things are not quite that bad - one of the major reasons we studied history over the centuries is we are looking for a way to ensure we will win the next war before the fighting starts. Thus there are a large group of military minded people (both generals and kings) who have incentive to find real truths not the nice folk fiction. Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.

▲

marginalia_nu 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At the same time, narratives (fictional or not) are how we understand the world, its history, its politics, its art, and it's even how we understand our own personal history, and how we reason about events around us, and what might transpire in the future.

It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.

▲

gwbas1c 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours?

I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.

	▲	scott_w 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I never thought Gladiator was a historically accurate movie. Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
	▲	bluGill 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There are things that I expect the authors to take creative license to further the plot. However there are a lot of background things that don't further the plot and so there is no loss to get them right - I'm disappointed in the latter.
	▲	triceratops 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> How could I expect that when I went into the theater to be entertained for 1-2 hours? Well were you?
	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

▲

cindyllm 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲

potato3732842 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sometimes it produces fiction with really good historical accuracy.