Originally Posted by
b1lanc
Couldn't agree with you more. TTT was perhaps the most historically accurate WWII movie that I've watched. After I saw the trailers and clips of Pearl Harbour I decided it wasn't worth watching.
What is unfortunate though is that a number of other films were actually historically accurate, but pulled seemingly unrelated real events from a number of real occurences to weave into a movie that the paying audience would go to. That shouldn't take away from the events that happened. For example, the 1943 movie Air Force has a scene at Clark Field where the crew chief of the B-17 Mary Ann learns that his son was killed without ever getting into the air due to the preceding fighter on take-off hitting a loaded B-17 waiting to go. That event was real. The fighter taking off after that was piloted by my high school math teacher who had to take-off through that flaming wreckage. Those details are well described in action reports now in the National Archives. I hate to see individual events of heroism minimized which is precisely what I felt Pearl Harbour did in order to pacify a gloating public and over-paid 'actors'.
My sister gave me a DVD of the movie 'Pearl Harbor' as a Christmas present when it first came out. Watched it once and determined it was so ludicrous that it's never even been out of it's holder since.
While technically not a movie, "Band of Brothers" is outstanding and reasonably faithful to the true story (it certainly helped that several survivors of Easy Company were interviewed by Ambrose when he wrote the book on which the mini-series was based, and were consultants during filming).
As for real events incorporated into a movie, if perhaps somewhat out of context, I had an old college buddy who shared my historical interest in WWII - in large part because his father had also seen action in WWII. Mine had served in the Pacific, his in Europe. Shortly after "Saving Private Ryan" came out we sat around and discussed the movie - with a lot of focus on what they got right and what they got wrong (I still think the Omaha beach landing is some of the most dramatic war video ever filmed). Anyway, we both scoffed at the scene where a glider had crashed because they'd added a ton of armor to protect the general who was going to be on-board - but didn't bother to tell the pilot about it. Simply too unbelievable they'd do something that stupid. Found out later that it really happened - and it was during the D-day landings
