The Daily Telegraph today runs a piece rattling through a list of twenty old favourites including Braveheart, Zulu, Saving Private Ryan, all examined for their accurate portrayal ( or not ) of actual events . It is interesting to see that CGI and all that it potentially offers has not helped much in this listing.
Of interest to this forum perhaps is 3rd place given to to Battle of Britain.
”Real pilots from the battle helped stage the dogfights, while production amassed a modest air force’s worth of historically correct (or thereabouts) planes.
British aircraft used were by and large actual Spitfires and Hurricanes,” says John. “The German planes you see in the movie are not actual Messerschmitts. They’re Spanish built lookalikes – almost the same but not quite.”
Zulu comes second.
No 1 rated is Tora Tora Tora.
”Military pedants will notice some inaccuracies – American T-6s stand in for Japanese Zeros, for instance – but it packs in literally explosive stunts and depicts the attack as it happened: bombs targeted battleships and parked aircraft, the devastation of the USS Arizona, and the heroic American pilots who took to the skies to shoot down Japanese planes.
“It’s a very historically accurate film,” says Nick Hodges from History Buffs. “The fact some of the stunt people almost died filming these crazy stunts shows how they tried to make it as realistic as possible.”
It also gets extra points for not being Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor.” ‘
No mention for the 633 Squadron though. They probably agreed that any movie that deliberatly destroys three servicable Mosquitos deserves to be blacklisted !
By: bazv - 16th February 2023 at 10:31
We watched Devotion (2022) the other night – Bearcats in the states – corsairs in Korea 🙂
It mostly stuck to the real story and was not ultra overdramatised like most war films since (enter a date).
The aerial coordinator (Kevin LaRosa) also did ‘Maverick’ recently and they went to great lengths to use real a/c when possible.
A mock Carrier was built on a runway at Bulloch County Airport,Statesboro,Georgia (one of the few areas where they slipped up as the ‘Island’ could have done with a little ‘ageing’ – it was too pristine).
The descent and approach into the forced landings was filmed up near Wenatchee and Pasco, Washington.The in cockpit shots were filmed in the rear seat of a Sea Fury T Mk. 20 .
The movie mostly sticks to the real story and seems historically accurate,and thus not grossly over dramatised like most war films made since (insert a date 
).
Flying sequence details are in this Flight Journal article….
https://www.flightjournal.com/flying-devotion-behind-scenes-pilots-brou…
By: George H - 16th February 2023 at 08:15
I would guess that accuracy is a difficult thing to portray unless it is a snapshot.
Films tend to draw people to the action element in my opinion but in reality it was very different.
I say this because my Grandfather made it his business to tell me ‘as it was’.
His view was that by telling people how tragic war is then people might think twice about having another one.
In the trenches during WW1, he said that there were long periods of time of total boredom interspersed with short periods of utter terror.
He recalled seeing ‘fabric covered machines’ falling out of the sky, looking after his freezing men by rubbing whale oil into their feet to prevent ‘trench foot’, laying duck boards over a quagmire of mud and with the ongoing threat of being gassed. They urinated in buckets and were ordered to soak a cloth in them in case of attack to slap it over their face if it happened.
He said that little things became big things.
He recalled that they were under a shelter in the trenches. He prepared his breakfast one morning and a shell landed on top causing the roof to partially collapse.
He was outraged that he lost his breakfast!
His batsman arrived and Grandad always remembered his first two words “Oh Sir”!
He was awarded an MC for showing great courage in the face of enemy fire.
He recalls leading his men down the side of a devastated wood and spotting a violet growing through the mud. Astonished to see this, he lowered himself down to take a look. A sniper shot at him at the same time but killed the chap behind him.
War is evil personified.
I’ve never seen a film that comes anywhere close to his descriptions which are too gruesome to write here.
I did hear that veterans who watched Saving Private Ryan thought this came close to the horrors they saw.
it’s so important to protect the freedoms they fought for.
By: 1batfastard - 9th February 2023 at 15:34
Hi All,
Battle Of Britain for accuracy of events portrayed / Mosquito Sqdn / Heroes Of Telemark / Bombardment (2021 still available on Netflix) An historical fact based film featuring the tragic accidental bombing of a school instead of the Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark.
( Incidentally the Mosquito flying sequences appear to CGI based on the actual footage from the raid ? in this rather sad film I personally thought the flying sequences where really good.)
I suppose at the end of the day the film companies have to fill a certain length of time to keep audiences engaged often sacrificing reality for artistic licence and filling in gaps between the action with unknown events or a fictitious story lines to fluff up bit of a dull movie otherwise. I cannot imagine a film that has non stop action from start to finish that are based on true event accounts unless they are really short films ?
Geoff.
By: Trolley Aux - 9th February 2023 at 14:15
Battle of Britain, should be No 1, it depicted genuine incidents and the people that were in it albeit names changed as many were still alive at the time of filming.
Zulu for sure a 2nd
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February 9, 2023 at 11:22 am