Edit: And wasn't the "brave heart" Bruce's that was taken on crusade after its owner's death?
My favourite one though is "Fire in the Sky". I saw it years ago and thought it was a decent movie, but I laughed when it said "based on a true story".
I guess a lot of liberties were taken in The Imitation Game.
Visualizations that show how true "based on a true story" movies are - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874753 - May 2025 (10 comments)
Originally 'the camera never lied' but nowadays 'the camera always lies'. This is my new starting point for everything I see.
Part of the art of storytelling for me is all about truth. The most fascinating stories are the true ones. Getting that truth told without confabulation or exaggeration is the goal as far as I see it, unless I am reading a bedtime story to an eight-year-old.
There is no Oscar or Golden Globe for movies that are the most grounded in fact. Yet so often, the true story, or even the printed book version (versus the movie) is the better story.
Clearly there are limitations on what can be done in budget and in time, and nothing from the past can be recreated verbatim, particularly if you want to trim down many story lines spanning many days/months/years into 90-120 minutes. However, this page confirms my hunch that, in the last century, the camera 'never lied' but, in this century, the camera never tells the truth.
But they completely missed people and their interactions, mentality, and attitude. And they were dressed too well ;) The last episode was cringy - they just repeated the lies that the Soviets told the world, blaming the operators, with a lot of bullshit in the sequence of events that led to the catastrophe.
daltont•4mo ago
IAmBroom•4mo ago