Hollywood and History: What the Movies Get Wrong from the Ancient Greeks to Vietnam

There is no shortage of Hollywood films about historical events, but what do the movies actually get right, and why do they get so much wrong?

Hollywood loves a story: good guys versus bad guys, heroes winning the day, and the guy gets the girl. But we all know real life isn?t exactly like that, and this is even more true when we look at history. Rarely do the just prevail and the three-act story cannot exist over continents and decades of human interaction. So, when Hollywood decides to exploit history for profit, we end up with a wide array of films. Some are comedies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, others are little more than action films playing dress up like Gladiator, and many are Oscar contenders burdened with an enormous sense of self-importance. But very few are historically accurate.

From Cleopatra to Da 5 Bloods, the reality is no matter what Hollywood?s intentions are, almost all historical films are an exaggeration or distortion of what really happened. Sometimes the alterations are