xii IntroduCtIon
which the majority of the populace have any acquaintance with or understanding
of a par tic u lar war or battle. Playing the dev il’s advocate, one might well argue that
historically inaccurate war movies are of no great consequence; lots of people
harbor misinformed or just plain wrong historical impressions they got from
movies—so what?
Actually, movies can have considerable sociopo liti cal impact in the real world.
Historian Andrew E. Larsen cites the case of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart: a grossly inac-
curate war movie that “has been credited with having a very substantial impact
on Scottish politics in the mid-1990s. It was released in 1995, and two years later
Scotland overwhelmingly voted in favor of a proposal to establish a Scottish Par-
liament. It has been credited with significantly encouraging Scottish nationalism
and has been accused to encouraging Anglophobia in Scotland. The film’s relent-
lessly negative depiction of the En glish as vicious rapists is wildly wrong, but very
effective.” Larsen also cites The Battle of Kosovo (1989), a Yugo slav historical drama/
war film filmed in Serbia that depicts the historical Battle of Kosovo between
medieval Serbia and the Ottoman Empire, which took place on 15 June 1389.
Larsen notes that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic used showings of the film
“as way to whip up Serbian support for his brutal treatment of the Kosovar Alba-
nians in the 1990s” (Larsen, 2014). Another example of war movies shaping a
nation’s cultural climate is the raft of Vietnam War films released in the 1970s and
1980s. These movies presented a series of competing narratives about the mean-
ing of the war and the character of the U.S. Vietnam veteran as Amer i ca strug gled
mightily to reconcile itself to the war’s bitter legacy. Nagging popu lar ste reo types
about post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)– deranged Vietnam veterans largely
derive from exaggerated cinematic repre sen ta tions, for example, The Deer Hunter
(1978) or Apocalypse Now (1979).
The historical integrity of war movies does matter but begs another question: Is
a high level of historical accuracy really pos si ble? The answer, most often, is no.
Past events are not only unrepeatable but also, in many ways, unknowable—or at
least subject to lots of subjective interpretation. Any cinematic re- creation of an
historical event— whether it be a fictional narrative imposed on a real setting or
an attempt to accurately retell a slice of military history—is inevitably going to be
the product of selective analy sis, guesswork, speculation, and fantasy based on a
complex welter of disparate and often contradictory sources and influenced by the
filmmaker’s biases and po liti cal agenda. The other prob lem facing historical reen-
actment in war movies (or any kind of movie based in history) is that cinematic
narrative requisites are frequently incompatible with historical accuracy. Like all
Hollywood genre movies, war movies generally require a hero or two, a villain or
villains, a few supporting characters, a carefully plotted three- act narrative arc, a
Manichean moral schema that clearly identifies the good guys (our side) from the
bad guys (usually a faceless and ruthless enemy), and a definitive resolution (victory,
defeat, or mere survival). Real battles in real wars involve hundreds or even thou-
sands of combatants and do not readily lend themselves to tidy narrative plotting,
easily identified heroes and villains, black and white moral oppositions, or pat