John Scalzi - Science and History: Everything the Movies Tell You Is Wrong
I've got another one of my questions for you: What do science fiction films and historical films have in common?
What they don't have in common is obvious: Timeframe. One genre almost always takes place in the future, or at least involves technology that is futuristic; the other, by definition, takes place in the past. There's generally very little overlap between the two there ("Yeah, but what about alternate history movies? And time-travel movies?" Quiet, friend, you're bothering me).
What about directors? You say. And actually, that's an excellent guess. Robert Zemeckis directed both Forrest Gump (which is history-esque, at least) and Contact; George Lucas' success with American Graffiti afforded him the chance to make Star Wars; Ridley Scott essayed cities past and future with Gladiator and Blade Runner; and Steven Spielberg directed both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year. There's an immense amount of overlap there. There's also an immense amount of overlap in motion picture technical fields as well -- the amount of special effects and CGI work that goes into a historical epic these days is no less impressive than what you'll see in science fiction or fantasy films.
But that's not what I'm after. The primary thing that science fiction and historical movies have in common is that when it comes to the genre's respective real-world subjects of science and history, neither film genre actually strives for accuracy. Rather, what they strive for is plausibility -- something that is "good enough" to get past the audience, for the purposes of the film.
As an example of this in the historical world, let's take Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning 1995 film Braveheart, in which Gibson plays Scottish historical hero William Wallace. Here's just some of what the film gets wrong:
1. The important Battle of Stirling Bridge takes place on a plain, minus the bridge.
2. William Wallace is seen being with (in several senses of the term) the English Princess Isabella, but the real world Wallace died three years before Princess Isabella was married to Edward II, and she didn't even go to England until after she was married. So the two did not meet, much less get it on.
3. Kilts and blue face paint? Both anachronistic, albeit in different directions (kilts came later; blue face paint before).
And so on.
Are audiences appalled at this lack of historical accuracy? Not in the least. Tell the average moviegoer that 700 years ago Mel Gibson painted his face blue, put on a kilt and kicked English ass so hard that the future Queen of England couldn't help but be beguiled, and he'll say "sounds about right" and grab some popcorn. It's not that average moviegoers are stupid, but that they're not heavily invested in factual accuracy (there's a difference), and what they really want is to have a cool movie-going experience for their seven dollars. If the filmmakers fudge the facts along the way, well, eh. It's Hollywood.
Thus: Braveheart, Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, 300 and other "historical" films which send actual historians into a bit of a tizzy. Occasionally one gets its history more right than not (Schindler's List), but generally speaking, when filmmakers have to choose drama or fact, they'll go with drama. And as long as William Wallace doesn't whip out an Uzi and slay both King Arthur and Henry V, the audience will buy it.
Science fiction films work the same way: The goal is not to be accurate in the portrayal of science, but merely to be accurate enough so that the average moviegoer -- the one who isn't, in fact, a physicist or biologist or astronomer or whatever -- doesn't get distracted from their enjoyment of their film. Indeed, one can argue that strict adherence to scientific accuracy could pull audiences out of their reverie: In space, there's no air to transmit sound, so explosions in space are silent. But show a frantic space battle without sound, and most audiences aren't going to thrill to the scientific accuracy; they're going to groan because in the most exciting part of the movie, the sound went out. It is possible to portray science more or less accurately in science fiction -- Contact and 2001 are two movies that do it up to a point (and notably both are based on the work of scientists, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, respectively). But again, when fact goes up against drama, fact is usually going to lose.
A cynic will note that the film industry is essentially banking on the ignorance of its audience in order to handwave over difficult facts, and the cynic will be absolutely right. It would also be correct that if we educated our people better, in both science and history, films wouldn't be able to let their facts slide nearly as much.
But it's worth noting that fact has never been an impediment to a story teller -- ask Homer or Shakespeare about this -- and in the case of science fiction, there's a big fat excuse inherent in its very name. One half of the phrase "science fiction" is the word "science," but the other other half of the phrase is "fiction." Speaking as someone who writes science fiction, I'm pretty solidly of the opinion that the "fiction" part has equal weight. So I think the "plausibility" guideline is not a bad one when it comes to science fiction, even as I wish and hope that dividing line for "plausible" for most movie goers gets a little more stringent over time. That's not too much to hope for in the long run.
But in the meantime remember: If you're getting what you know of history or science from Hollywood, you're doing it wrong. So. Very. Wrong.
Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John Scalzi is the author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies as well as the novels Old Man's War and the upcoming Zoe's Tale. His column appears every Thursday.
unfortunately it seems in many cases the movies are exactly where people are getting their historical (and scientific) education!
William Wallace with an Uzi? That's as incongruous as Robert E. Lee with an AK-47.
Oh, wait, that's been done.
I think there is also an underlying cultural phenomenon that is in play, the role of what is 'legendary'. There was even a brief allusion to this in Braveheart- something about William Wallace being 8ft tall? - Anyway, historical films, Epics, are often more about the cultural legends the audience shares than being a documentary. A great example of this is 'The Patriot', another Gibson film - who was it based on? The title character is a composite, I have no idea if the villian is based on anyone in particular - but the archetypes are part of American culture - The Patriot, the evil redcoat, the underdog, the wronged husband/father avenging his family etc. Almost as if part of our collective unconcious (I think the story of Braveheart, or the Patriot could've easily been set in ancient Rome, or a future space setting and still be great film) I think my entire post that may be stating the obvious - (I hope) that the average moviegoer KNOWS that 'Pearl Harbor' is not 100% accurate (fact/history) but is 100% accurate as the "Legend of the Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor"
Contact the movie isn't even faithful to Contact the book. That doesn't prevent it from being one of my all-time favorite SF/Science movies. Imagining what it'd be like to toil in the land of null results which is SETI and then suddenly get The Signal -- that whole sequence brings tears to my eyes every time. Even though a friend of mine who did graduate work at VLA said if you sat on a blanket near the big dishes you'd be eaten by fire ants. (grin) And even though the actors didn't have a clue what their dialogue meant, they uttered it with excitement, panic, enthusiasm and correct pronouncement, even sarcasm, that they were totally believable. One of the VLA consultants had to go to the bathroom on the set one day, walked out of the doors and turned... smack into a wall, because he forgot he was on a movie set. They even copied the Post-It Notes stuck to all the monitors.
Where Science and History and a bit of SF all collide is in Apollo 13. 'Nuff said. I still get chills during the re-entry sequence... the lift-off... the accident...
As for Braveheart, another favorite of mine, they don't have the Battle of Stirling Bridge, they just have the Battle of Stirling. And they filmed it in Ireland anyway. (double-edge-grin) Great score, too, even though the real battle scenes didn't have full orchestral accompaniment in Real Life. The History Channel delights in airing episodes of "History versus Hollywood".
Good call for your topic, Mr. Scalzi!
Dr. Phil
Just a small note.
"Thus: Braveheart, Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, 300 and other "historical" films which send actual historians into a bit of a tizzy."
300 wasn't a historical film. It was a film based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller which was inspired by the events at the Battle of Thermopylae. The graphic novel fabricates the tale and makes it more fantasy-fiction than truth or reality.
Not that I'm nitpicking, I enjoyed 300 for what it's worth and never read the novel, but thought I'd contribute...
The silence of the space battles in Firefly only added to the tension, IMO. So it's really about the skill of the director.
Epheros:
That's a distinction that blew past the majority of people who saw the film, I suspect. Certainly the producers seem to have thought so, which is why so much of the DVD supplementary material is spent explaining that the movie is not, in fact, purporting to be an accurate retelling of events.
So, there wasn't some enormously fat bald man with lobster-claw arms back in Ancient Greece?
Huh.
Yea, I had to spend about a thousand words the other day explaining to someone that HBO's Rome was not the best place to get one's historical information regarding the late Roman Republic from.
Not that I dislike it, even as a scholar of classical history I thought it was fantasticly entertaining and caught the feel of the era in a way modern audiences might be able to grok, but historically accurate it was not. What's odd is that I got far more peeved at the LoTR movies for leaving out Glorfindel than I did at Rome for half-assedly merging Fulvia (Antony's 2nd wife) into the character of Attia.
Actually, I enjoy those "H vs H" shows, and none have prevented me from seeing a movie because it was horribly inaccurate. No, the only thing that generally keeps me from seeing a film would be because, well, it's bad.
If the movie is good, niggling details like those described just won't bother me. When it's bad, though, those "niggling details" are magnified tenfold. I consider myself an intelligent, well-educated person, but entertain/stimulate/make me think and I won't sweat the details.
Among other things, I was a band geek in high school and one thing our instructor kept drilling into our heads was don't worry if there is a slip here or there; if your heart is in the performance, if it entertains the audience, they won't remember the occasional honk or flat note, just the beautiful music during the rest of the concert.
Yeah, but sometimes the counterfactual is so grievously wrong that it breaks the spell. The space helmets lit from inside in Outland, the barefaced Fremen in their stillsuits in Dune bother me more than the visible-in-vacuum beams in Star Wars. For that matter, the gap-jumping bus in Speed (don't people understand gravity any better than Wile E. Coyote does?) made me lose the movie almost from the outset.
I was the sole guy laughing hilariously at the teaser sequence to Armageddon, for which I promised I'd explain to my son after the movie [which I enjoyed thoroughly, being the complete sentimental jerk I am].
Why?
Because the director correctly decided to show -- ~65 mya -- the Yucatan and Florida Peninsulas as they appear today.
Why is that correct?
Because like the "is correct but feels wrong" silence of space, the emotional resonance would not be felt properly if a meteoroid blazed through the atmosphere toward an alien-planet appearing geography, now would it?
I won't go on -- as an MIT alumnus -- enumerating the technical errors, because the production team signaled me from the beginning with that nudge and wink that "Hey, we're not taking this very seriously and neither should you."
I recall one "bad science movie" page, with which I mostly agreed, citing Superman 1 for showing that if the Big Red S! spun the Earth in the opposite direction, time would reverse as an example of "bad science".
That's an example of bad criticism. Fellas, you're speaking about a flick where the guy could fly as an act of will and early exposure to red solar light. As my late acquaintance Sam Moskowitz once mischievously ascribed to Isaac Asimov, in rebuttal to an exchange with Albert Einstein:
Dr. E: According to Relativity nothing nor no one can exceed the speed of light.
Dr. A: With all due respect, Dr. E, your Relativity is only a theory, while Superman is a fact.
:>)
Obviously -- Nerdgassing Fan Save -- the scene was cinematic shorthand for the Ubermensch traveling back into time as indicated by the Earth's reverse rotation.
It looks cooler than the cinematic standby of the back-spinning clock-hands because, you know, he's SUPERMAN!
Also, it's not entirely anti-entropic and paradox-causing including because Supes arrives earlier than he did in the local time-space than he did before, thus preempting the late arrival. In other words, it's exactly like a do-over tape or film edit: "Hey! What happened to all the fluffs during the takes/sessions?" "We scrapped them." "Oh."
Some fun "bad science" film sites:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/
JJB
Yeah, But it's not just Historical and Science fiction either.. This applies just to just about any movie genre. In Horror, The bad guys don't lay down and die. Cops in movies never have to fill out paperwork. Westerns? Well, they're historical, but have their own set of anachronisms and tropes that aren't accurate.
Drama and story will win out everytime.
Re: 300
It was based on a Comic Book by Frank Miller of the same name 300, not the actual Battle of Thermopylae. Toward that end, it actually was pretty damn true to the story.
At the same time, Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics and author of many books about Classical Greece believes that if we could have anachronistically allowed the Greeks to see '300' after the battle, they would have approved. The stories and art of the greeks showed men dressed like those in '300', not like they really would have dressed for war. So even 2500 year old cultures had the same blind spot: If it isn't true, it should be.
It's funny how this laxity in getting the details right is received completely the opposite when it comes to fiction reading. In a sci-fi movie, you can get away with flubbing a few (if not most) of the actual science for the sake of delivering entertaining fiction (see: Signs). But in the print world of sci-fi, there is far less generosity bestowed upon the writer who does not manage to have both his science fact and entertaining fiction value up to snuff at the same time. The burden is on the sci-fi writer; he/she has to juggle a delicate balance between plausible science and gripping narrative at once.
I suppose this is due to the inherent nature of both mediums: films are visual, books are literary. The former has to be eye-catching and gorgeous first and foremost, the latter witty and verbally engaging, as well as factual. Sometimes the two meet together in film.
But not often enough.
Ehhh.... I always cringe when the rules of physics are ignored in SciFi. Not so much if there is mild anachronisms in Historical films. So I guess I'm the opposite: having been spoiled by Michael Crichton's "hard science fiction" novels, I get upset when films take liberties with science. And for some reason, inaccurate historical films don't bother me. Hmm. Perhaps this would make a good blog: why do inaccuracies in science fictional movies bother me so much when inaccuracies in historical movies doesn't?
I just watched the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, based on a recommendation in the comments to your Ridley Scott column. I found the commentary tracks and the making-of features fascinating. Scott and Monahan (screenplay) can tell you practically down to the shoelaces what they changed from best-known history and why they changed it. They got themselves so immersed in the history that they argued back with historians about some interpretations. The way they worked out the balance between history and story is engrossing in its own right.
Parenthetical: It's all also a remarkable short course in filmmaking. Scott goes from talking about how they decided what camp chores the knights would be doing and how, to a discussion on the importance of density in narrative and the role of films in society's transmission of its stories, to how you shoot a scene in a tent with bright noon desert sun outside when you want the details outside the tent visible, to how you weigh cost versus benefit when you are setting up a cast of thousands. I love that kind of stuff.
Geek? Me? Nah.
Manny, I was one of those people gushing over the DC of KoH in that article. So I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the experience!
And, yes, the 2 discs worth of extra features was geek heaven for film buffs! Not to mention the film itself was remarkable.
What was your impression of the film on a whole?
What was your impression of the film on a whole?
When you take out all the relationships and motivations and complexities from a film that is fundamentally about decisions, relationships, motivations, and complexities, it makes it worse. It also hurts to take out the information that lets the rest make sense. Whodathunk?
I think that the real version is just stunning. And Orlando Bloom's full performance is remarkable. The edits had the effect of making him a placeholder for a protagonist, played by a wooden doll. He actually did a lot with a difficult man.
And they picked a great time/place for it. I hope they get to make Tripoli, too.
Do not get me, a writer, started with the book versus the movie stuff. I mean, we know movies are not meant to be historically accurate. But too much stupidity is afoot in this world. I for one, do not waste my breath telling people that they are wrong. That they shouldn't get their historical information from a few scenes in the Rome series, much less in combat movies or space battles. Everybody can say Arthur C. Clarke sucks all they want to. Explosions are all bull in science fiction at large. We all know the science -which is tweaked to sound like real science, also bull, but those of us who are capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction know that while the imaginative, and painfully average movie-goer sometimes does not. I have no patience for stupidity. If anything, I'd like my science fiction novels to be 'accurate' even in the world I'm inventing for my characters. Your rules have to make some sense. Contact being not true to the book though, well, I haven't read the book yet, because I'm too busy reading non-fiction at the moment but I'm going to eventually go back to fiction, someday when I have 36 hour days insteqad of 24.