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Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

Most polarizing for me are the dramatized history movies like Napoleon. Most of the public will not be aware of what parts are true, and what parts are fiction. History will be remember as portrayed by these movies. They're basically committing falsification of history. It will be hard for the public to learn from history, if history is portrayed incorrectly in these movies.

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> Most of the public will not be aware of what parts are true, and what parts are fiction.

I doubt anyone alive now is aware of the whole truth given that it takes place 200 years ago in a politically turbulent part/era of the world.

We see errors/lies in articles about current verifiable topics all the time, surely history from hundreds of years ago had even less fidelity.

I doubt the OP refers to who decided what and when. That part does get rewritten by the winners.

It's more about historical inaccuracy overall. I think Napoleon in particular has an analysis on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry [1].

[1] It's not a proper analysis like he's done for other movies, but here it is: https://acoup.blog/2023/11/17/fireside-friday-november-17-20...

I agree there is a difference in misrepresenting events that have lots of evidence to support them and things that would likely have poor record keeping. I had assumed a movie called Napoleon might be about the personal motivations/interactions rather than more verifiable events.

argh, this is such a bad faith argument. The enemy of better is best.

We can't know the whole truth but we have enough quality data about ancient rome from multiple angles to know "gladiator" probably shouldn't be our first lead on the matter.

Yes, I acknowledged that in a reply to a sibling comment, however, I would take any movie/tv show dialogue that suggests motivations to be speculation unless provided with heavy evidence. A lot of times, this type of stuff can paint someone as good/bad, and it is either completely made up or misrepresented for the purposes of drama and selling the media.

It would behoove everyone to never take movie representations of history as fact, even if the broad strokes are supported by evidence.

I do get the somewhat discomfort with novels and movies dealing with historical events and people. While often enjoying his work, I definitely had this feeling with much of James Michener's work. You're reading this massive tome and it's often unclear (though he did sometimes provide some notes) what is actual historical fact, what is speculative, and what is made up out of whole cloth.

If “most of the public will not be aware” it’s not going to be polarizing.. as polarizing and disputed aren’t the same thing. As far as I can tell Napoleon bombed and was largely panned, so also not polarizing.

Biopics generally have the issue that there's enough creative license taken that people looking for fidelity are unhappy while, at the same time, the writers/director are sufficiently constrained within factual guardrails that they can't necessarily create the exact movie they'd like to.

Was it any good? I haven't seen a movie in years but this one seemed interesting as a history buff. Getting Napoleon right and that whole era is incredibly challenging - even after reading several books about the guy and those times, I'm still confused.

I thought it was pretty bad. It made Napoleon out to be uncharismatic and a total "simp" as the kids would say towards Josephine. He just comes off as a war monger Dictator who is ruining Europe for his single-minded vision of personal grandeur.

That's not the read I get on the man from my reading, so I found it very disappointing from a historical perspective.

From the "is it fun to watch" point of view... it was middling for me. Some of the battle scenes were cool, and there were some funny lines throughout that made me laugh, but overall as a story I found it pretty uninspired. Like, Gladiator had tons of historical inaccuracies as well, but it stood on its own as a really fun movie to watch and I can't put Napoleon in that category.

That's a bummer. It's prob the only movie I've looked forward to in a long time. Oh well.

We don't really get to see Napoleon the man. He is portrayed as an oddly bland man, passively floating through events, which is so incredibly at odds from the reality of the man as I understand him. Really, all of the character attributes that made him 'Napoleon the Great' have been cut out. None of his lasting martial or civil innovations are mentioned.

It's hard to imagine that this was an accident, since Scott clearly took great care to portray Josephine (an aging, black-toothed, capricious bimbo whose thoughtlessness was regularly a problem for Napoleon) as a young, beautiful and strong woman who was apparently "cleaning up after" Napoleon.

I got the distinct impression of a British director gleefully taking ole Boney down a notch.

Thats a bummer. Napoleon is many things, but bland and passive, are not him. The British hated him so perhaps Scott's choices were intentional :)

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