I agree that sometimes in order to keep the attention of the audience hooked some movie makers may have to make "compromises".
In case of many movies the contribution to history might be that people watching the movies may become interested in learning more about the real events reading about the facts as a consequence and this is something that ought not to go unappreciated.
But it seriously annoys me when they then proceed to pretend it to be historically accurate or when they start telling inaccurate stories that are actually less interesting than the historical truth or (maybe worse still) if history is told in such a one sided fashion that it becomes outright propaganda.
The movie Braveheart is a movie that is enjoyable to watch and has some nice music by our much appreciated composer James Horner. From a historian's point of view that movie is a kind of maximum credible accident! I'm just giving a strongly abbreviated list of the most extreme blunder ignoring a hardly countable number of "details".
1. The clothing! Kilts, plaid and tartan weren't "invented" around 1300!
2. Alleged imposing of "ius primae noctae" (Feudal lords get the right to spend the first night with a newly wedded bride). Not only was it never imposed upon Scotland, but we don't posses ANY legal records of it ever being imposed anywhere in the European middle ages! This is not strictly to say that it didn't ever happen because there is mention of it in contemporary poems and fiction and it is more likely than not that Feudal lords of great power simply took that "right" but there isn't any sort of it ever being legally established anywhere.
3. Bagpipes being outlawed instruments. BS! Not only was the bagpipe not outlawed by the English in Scotland at that time (though they really did in the aftermath of the Jacobite wars in 18th century) but the instrument itself was hardly perceived as specifically Scottish at the time since it enjoyed great popularity in many other regions as well.
4. Scots are depicted as the peaceful people who want nothing but their independence and would never quarrel with anyone else since the clans are sufficiently preoccupied fighting amongst each other. The movie has William Wallace lay out to the Princess how very, very cruel the English have treated the Scotish civilians. What the movie fails to mention is that in this respect it had been quite a giving and taking between Scots and English. Scots had frequently raided across the English border and they hadn't been all to civil with the English in Northumberland and Cumberland either.
5. Speaking of Wallace and Princess Isabelle de France. She was 12 years old by the time Wallace was executed in 1305 and the two had never ever met. She was not married to Edward II. until 1308 (after Wallace's dead). While it is true that Edward II. had homosexual relationships (depicted in a rather derogatory way in the movie) he also had three kids with her (two of whom survived) and for a long time their marriage is supposed to have been harmonic.
6. As for Edward I. "longshanks" he is depicted as a horrible tyrant in the movie. In some ways he likely was (one of his most notorious actions being the expelling of the English Jews) but he can hardly be considered as much worse than many other kings at the time (by the way, he did not die before Wallace's execution but survived him by two years). The movie depicts him as both cruel and coward (we never see him fight in battle). In the scene of the battle of Falkirk we see him flee from the defeated Wallace. In reality the king had been trampled over by a horse the previous day and broke two rips in the accident. In order not to damage the morale of his army he nevertheless got on his horse in spite of the pain he must have suffered. How many 59 year olds would with such injury mount a horse to lead their men into battle? Whatever else one may say about him, he did not lack personal courage.
7. Let's talk about battles. First we have the battle of "Stirling Bridge". This is a fine example of how movies make history duller than it was. The movie has the English outnumber the Scots three to one. Sources disagree on the exact numbers but estimates go as far as seeing the Scots outnumbered five to one. However, the Scots took advantage of the bridge allowing as many English as they could handle to cross before collapsing the bridge and fighting the English on marshy ground where the horses of the English knights got stuck. The movie turned it into a painfully boring battle on flat ground without any landmarks like the bridge with English being trapped so simply as if they had never ever heard of such an invention like a "spear". Speaking of spears, the most important Scotish battle tactic, the Shiltron was never shown in the movie. The shiltron had a mass of spearmen standing in a very tight circular formation with spears facing in every direction. The Shiltron was almost impossible to break for knights on horseback but proved very vulnerable to arrows. Though the use of that formation is well documented for the battle of Falkirk (second large battle in the movie which is staged with spectacular but absolutely unhistorical "oiling the field and and burning it once the enemy moves over it tactic") we only ever see that line.
8. The movie also has Wallace conquer York. Not only did he not conquer that major northern city, he never ever even lay siege to it. His attack on English soil was more like a large raid hoping to defeat the English in a battle on their ground but that battle was never offered to him.
I could go on with this for hours, but what I really want to mention is the opening line of the movie which after all that is mentioned above (and a lot more that is not mentioned) is really kicking a historian's corpse:
I shall tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.
After SUCH an opening line one would seriously expect the movie makers to add a little more historical substance than a few names to a movie.
Gee it really makes me want to hang, draw, and quarter them then to send their four body parts to each direction of the country while impaling their heads on a bridge and... err... yeah, that one is actually historically correct
Another movie that is just terrible is Pearl Harbor. Here we have a case of a movie that is almost undisguised propaganda. There are some spectacular effects which we like to see but other than that there is very little historical substance to a movie that pretends to be so historically correct. Some ships depicted in the movie didn't exist at the time of the attack, there is an entirely ridiculous scene in which people on an airfield take cover of the planes attacking with torpedoes under their hulls (that would be highly effective against an airfield, wouldn't it?), and the Japanese (with the exception of a few moments included that scream "For the sake of political correctness only!") are depicted as thoroughly evil. We see Japanese planes strafing and bombing a group of fleeing nurses!! Ignoring the fact that the zeros throwing the bombs in the respective scene couldn't carry any bombs at all they surely wouldn't have thrown them on a group of fleeing nurses when there are airfields, docs, and ships to bomb (so even from a military point of view it would have been a "waste of ammo") that scene was really only to bring home the point that they were "evil" to all those who hadn't understood that point or had been irritated by the political correctness scene of a Japanese waving to a lady hanging up her laundry to warn her to get out of harms way.
The movie was in the cinemas in the summer preceding 9/11. Is it a wild guess to assume that the scene in which colonel Doolittle tells that he would stir his plane into an enemy target if he was hit over enemy territory (rather than bailing out) might have not made it into the movie after 9/11?
Well, these are just two examples, but there are many more.
