Which era of warfare gets the most accurately depicted in movies or other media?

[todofwar]

So we often talk about how unrealistic space warfare is, but is any era depicted correctly? I'm picking WWI just because they seem to focus on the brutality of it, and the trenches seem correct enough. Never seen a movie actually diving into the overall strategy or technology too much though. 

For least I'm going with ancient. Usually movies and TV seem to make it more about one on one battles, which has never been the case in any era. And swords everywhere, but in ancient times the alloys were not strong enough to make any kind of long sword. 

Also, not sure if this belongs here or lounge, it's about how technology is represented but at the same time not just that?

[KerikBalm]

WWI has been handled pretty well... until that most recent battlefield game... based on what I see on youtube... oh my god is it inaccurate.

[Jonfliesgoats]

Movies get war all wrong.  There are over a million of us who have deployed now, and the movies are still all stupid.  I suspect depictions of warfare in all historic periods are equally stupid.  Even the films which claim to be accurate aren't.

Books, however, are another story.

 

[Nuke]

im told by a usmc veteran that apocalypse now was pretty accurate. things like going after your own guys, the effectiveness of the air cav and dropping tabs of acid in a combat zone were all things he saw.

[SargeRho]

I dunno about era, but I think Fury, Black Hawk Down, and Full Metal Jacket were fairly accurate in how they portrayed war, though maybe not quite so historically accurate.

[LN400]

I'd think any war movie where the audience go "awesome!" get the whole war thing wrong.

[HoloYolo]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

WWI has been handled pretty well... until that most recent battlefield game... based on what I see on youtube... oh my god is it inaccurate.

BF1 takes place at the end of WWI, where trenches were fading away to new types of warfare. Tanks and automatic handheld weapons were becoming norms. Technology moved forward like the frontlines, instead of constant stalemate and attrition. BF1 is meant to explore the end of "The Great War" and show how warfare truly changed, on a personal and frontlines level.

[kerbiloid]

WWi looks most accurate, as all you need: dig a trench in dirt and fill it with dirt.
(And obergefreiter Schultze with pikenhelm, nose-glasses and water-cooled machine-gun, because dieselpunk rules.)

Ancient Greeks use kun-fu, while everyone knows that they used muay-thai.

Edited December 5, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Matuchkin]

Post WW2 era gets least accurately depicted. Every damn time, I see movies in which tanks are heavily used in urban areas and are by definition more powerful than infantry, movies in which operating a fighter jet includes digitalized female voices, flashing red lock-on markers, launching missiles simply by pointing your plane at the enemy, insane manoeuvres that shouldn't be possible in several aircraft (I'm looking at you, Top Gun). Also, soldiers completely crushing the enemy then spending time at the end of the film to honor their own "massive losses" simply because they're American, nuclear bombs being treated like normal weapons that you can just use to threaten a country simply because you are Russian, soldiers firing LMGs and other automatic weapons in CQC situations as if it's nothing, spies being depicted as extremely mysterious individuals who are ominous and suspicious as hell and constantly have to be talking with a "boss". Computer hacking being treated as some kind of easy feat. Holographic screens for every damn occasion, missiles with infinite range, planes being able to escape lock on or confuse their enemy simply by doing a loop extremely quickly. The list goes on.

[todofwar]

I think a special mention has to be naval warfare. Pretty sure it has never actually been depicted accurately, maybe the 17th century? Definitely nothing past then, since gun ranges have gotten longer and longer so ships in WWI and WWII we're miles away from their targets. 

[wumpus]

4 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

Post WW2 era gets least accurately depicted. 

Do you really think Holywood makes makes the slightest effort to be accurate to be accurate for any other era?  I suspect that US civil war is an exception, because there are massive numbers of hobbyists/history buffs in the US who obsess over that era.  So directors and producers will *hear* about every single error with a volume we can only dream about wrt orbital mechanics.  On the other side, I'd expect that US-Indian wars to be hilariously inaccurate (even though only a decade or two after the highly accurate Civil War era), simply because Holywood is going to conform to the rules of a Holywood western, and would expect audiences to be confused by the real thing (this may have been a problem for the movie "Buffalo Soldiers", but I never saw that one).

Never mind the demand for accurate Civil War movies (which have competing demands for various stories about why they were fighting in the first place, but at least "what happened" might be accurate), I'd claim that WWII propaganda-approved movies (either made during wartime or a bit later with the assistance of the Army) are likely the limit of what Hollywood will make.  Not that they are all that accurate, but that such is what audiences expect, and that's what they will get.

Don't expect anything more from Hollywood (and expect it mostly driven by politics: consider the recent Red Dawn movie).  Also expect Hollywood to be based more on other movies than any historical background (so things without previously well known movies have a chance, those with many movies are going to be hopeless).  Books should be wildly more accurate (largely because if you'll read a book for the fiction, a wildly larger percentage than normal will read a book for the background information).  I'd suspect that wargaming (i.e. tactics and strategy, not fps shooters) should be at the top, but in practice I think that it works out more to "gaming war": the audience probably knows the facts better than anyone, and understand that excessive accuracy ruins their medium even more than most*.

* no, I am not a wargamer.

Edited December 9, 2016 by wumpus
decided a point by point answer was pretty dumb and missed the forest for the trees.

[todofwar]

3 hours ago, wumpus said:

Don't expect anything more from Hollywood (and expect it mostly driven by politics: consider the recent Red Dawn movie).  Also expect Hollywood to be based more on other movies than any historical background (so things without previously well known movies have a chance, those with many movies are going to be hopeless).  Books should be wildly more accurate (largely because if you'll read a book for the fiction, a wildly larger percentage than normal will read a book for the background information).  I'd suspect that wargaming (i.e. tactics and strategy, not fps shooters) should be at the top, but in practice I think that it works out more to "gaming war": the audience probably knows the facts better than anyone, and understand that excessive accuracy ruins their medium even more than most*.

* no, I am not a wargamer.

I think the issue with war games is there is a strong perception about what should be the most effective unit. For example, Lord of the Rings and other similar films/books have us thinking cavalry are the be all end all of military units. So, developers try to match those expectations. Or they make units under or overpowered to balance the game, regardless of how powerful things might be in real life. 

[tater]

On 12/4/2016 at 10:36 PM, kerbiloid said:

WWi looks most accurate, as all you need: dig a trench in dirt and fill it with dirt.
(And obergefreiter Schultze with pikenhelm, nose-glasses and water-cooled machine-gun, because dieselpunk rules.)

No one has ever done artillery very well, particularly WW1 artillery. The scale of it is impossible to imagine I think for people who were not in it. Modern bombardment (air, rockets or gun tubes) is far more accurate, but is not on the same order of magnitude. You read of "drum fire" where artillery shells are landing at the pace of a snare drum. For hours. Then you read when the fire slowed to drum fire... One barrage that went on and off for days had lengthy periods where individual explosions were undetectable. I seem to recall reading that a wood near Verdun received some 80,000 shells per acre in the opening bombardments.

Anything with cannon that is not modern tends to be wrong, with explosions where there should be none. They work to add smoke and fire to combat with arrows and swords, too, for visual effect. No one seems to get masses infantry right in any combat pre-firearms (or pikemen, post firearms).

[todofwar]

1 hour ago, tater said:

No one has ever done artillery very well, particularly WW1 artillery. The scale of it is impossible to imagine I think for people who were not in it. Modern bombardment (air, rockets or gun tubes) is far more accurate, but is not on the same order of magnitude. You read of "drum fire" where artillery shells are landing at the pace of a snare drum. For hours. Then you read when the fire slowed to drum fire... One barrage that went on and off for days had lengthy periods where individual explosions were undetectable. I seem to recall reading that a wood near Verdun received some 80,000 shells per acre in the opening bombardments.

Anything with cannon that is not modern tends to be wrong, with explosions where there should be none. They work to add smoke and fire to combat with arrows and swords, too, for visual effect. No one seems to get masses infantry right in any combat pre-firearms (or pikemen, post firearms).

I'm still waiting for someone to try and recreate a WWI artillery barrage for the big screen. As you say, I just can't imagine it. 

[tater]

Yeah, it's something I would like to see. Not for real, obviously, but to further my sense of amazement that human beings put up with that, and didn't all (on both sides) just say, "screw you guys, I'm going home." What if they threw an apocalypse, and nobody came (or those that came turned around and left).

At Verdun, the Germans also had some of the huge siege guns they brought early to reduce fortresses in Belgium. Those were throwing 1000 kg shells, so it was a huge mixture of stuff, too. An account of that forest I mentioned (and there are very few accounts of the opening days) said that a shell would fell a huge tree, and before the tree fully fell to the ground, it was thrown back aloft. People like bugs in a rainstorm, trying not to get wet somehow...

The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan did this well---giving a sense of "How could anyone survive that?"

 

Edited December 10, 2016 by tater

[todofwar]

I wonder if you could recreate the battle of Verdun for a VR headset. Don't even have to move around, just staying in a spot and watch everything falling around you.

[Vanamonde]

Can I just say that it aggravates the snot out of me the way that fighter-bombers are always shown dropping their bombs from such low altitudes that in reality they'd be getting blown out of the sky by their own bombs? Because it really does. 

Oh, and we constantly see soldiers with swords killing each other with slashing swings, even though the target soldier is wearing chain or plate armor which would render this impossible. 

Oh, but I recently learned that this is not entirely unrealistic in samurai battles, because only the wealthiest samurai could afford iron armor, and the vast majority of them were actually wearing hardened, laquered leather armor. 

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, tater said:

You read of "drum fire" where artillery shells are landing at the pace of a snare drum. For hours. Then you read when the fire slowed to drum fire... One barrage that went on and off for days had lengthy periods where individual explosions were undetectable. I seem to recall reading that a wood near Verdun received some 80,000 shells per acre in the opening bombardments.

That's even much easier to film.
As all what the characters are doing: lying on the borrom of the trench, with faces into mud and closed eyes, covering heads with something and watching stars and circles.
So, a realistic drum fire depiction would be mostly a soundtrack with screensaver.

Director's cut: somebody raises his head from dirt, sees a field of dirt, then: "oops!", "(flash)", "ouch!", end of movie.

Big cannons themselves of course would be great.
Especially really big ones depicted in real time: 1 shot per hour.
That would be series. "Spoiler about 5th season. Our crew will be cleaning and repairing the cannon for 8 episodes, prepare to enjoy!"

 

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

Can I just say that it aggravates the snot out of me the way that fighter-bombers are always shown dropping their bombs from such low altitudes that in reality they'd be getting blown out of the sky by their own bombs? Because it really does.

It's like a romatic Moon from horizon to horizon.
Otherwise one little bag in the sky drops several tiny points on several little bugs on the ground. No visual candy from any side.
Only realistic space battles can be more dull.

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

I wonder if you could recreate the battle of Verdun for a VR headset

No need in headset,
VR SFX utilities:

Spoiler

(The latter is head protection)

 

[tater]

I'd dearly love to see the Southwest Pacific in a movie with some of Kenney's kids and Pappy Gunn's field mods...

Not terribly low, the white dots in the middle are parafrag bombs. They are parachute-retarded, B-25s carried over 100 of them. 

 

Or mast-height, skip bombing attacks:

 

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

That's even much easier to film.
As all what the characters are doing: lying on the borrom of the trench, with faces into mud and closed eyes, covering heads with something and watching stars and circles.
So, a realistic drum fire depiction would be mostly a soundtrack with screensaver.

Director's cut: somebody raises his head from dirt, sees a field of dirt, then: "oops!", "(flash)", "ouch!", end of movie.

 

The real life accounts were not from people INSIDE that forest at Verdun, but from a km or 2 away, watching in horror, particularly as the barrage could move, like playing a hose in a garden. Movies often take camera POVs grossly outside that of the participants, or have you only ever watched movies exclusively filmed with steady cams and go pros?

[radonek]

Bad question IMO, it largely depens on who is creating the stuff. It is obvious that, say, Hollywood would be more careful about Lincoln then King Arthur. Space combat is probably only point where everyone is equal in wrongness. So  far best war movies I've seen are Stalingrad (the1993 one) and Das Boot.

[78stonewobble]

To me, the question seems a bit silly... No offence OP.

We can go into near infinite detail in this one: Oh people were shorter back then, you can't use tank Y as a stand in for tank X (even though there are no surviving tank X's), that ship in the background seen for 1,2 second is modern, that thing didn't happen or that thing did happen, but to a different person at another time, that unit didn't exist and so on and so on... And offcourse a very accurate movie, can make a dumb mistake whereas even a less accurate movie can get something right.

Personally I'd say... if I want historical accuracy, I should watch documentaries... Movies, to varying degrees of historical accuracy, try to tell stories.

...

Doesn't mean we can't discuss technicalities and details as much as we want, but I just don't think it's reason to get worked up about.

[magnemoe]

On 5.12.2016 at 0:36 AM, HoloYolo said:

BF1 takes place at the end of WWI, where trenches were fading away to new types of warfare. Tanks and automatic handheld weapons were becoming norms. Technology moved forward like the frontlines, instead of constant stalemate and attrition. BF1 is meant to explore the end of "The Great War" and show how warfare truly changed, on a personal and frontlines level.

The static trench warfare was also an western front thing. Other battlefields was far more mobile. 
Western front was mostly static as it was very serious firepower and soldiers in the area, you needed an huge offensive to break trough. 
Perhaps more important, it was far easier to move reserves in by truck or train to counter the break than to exploit it, 

Main issue most has with BF1 is the machine pistol who was very rare and experimental. 

[HoloYolo]

49 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The static trench warfare was also an western front thing. Other battlefields was far more mobile. 
Western front was mostly static as it was very serious firepower and soldiers in the area, you needed an huge offensive to break trough. 
Perhaps more important, it was far easier to move reserves in by truck or train to counter the break than to exploit it, 

Main issue most has with BF1 is the machine pistol who was very rare and experimental. 

Yeah I'm aware. Africa and East Asia weren't static. Eastern and Balkan front (I think) we're static but not as much as the Western. Although I don't see the SMGs as a problem I do agree about that pistol. 

[tater]

Trench warfare spontaneously happened under the right conditions due to technology. The ability to kill was greater than the ability to maneuver in most cases.

 

Regarding @78stonewobble's points, the OP includes movies and other media. Going forward, we can expect more and more realism possible in games and VR. Movies will have more and more capabilities to represent reality as well, including possible blends of VR and linear entertainment like movies/TV.

I'd prefer such things to be more realistic when possible, I suppose. Look at awful movies that become the primary understanding for many people since they don't actually read history. That gets to something else... superficial realism (using the right equipment, uniforms, etc), personal realism (the underlying truth of the experiences of the participants), and historical realism---getting the facts right.

In the artillery example I gave, some people survived that initial bombardment. Showing them trying desperately to dig to China in abject terror might well show their perspective accurately, and the scene might be exactly the same in that sense from a lesser barrage. Zooming out to show the reality of the attack might put it in a historical perspective.

[tater]

OK, can properly type now (daughter got off laptop, I had been drinking coffee and typing on phone).

2 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

To me, the question seems a bit silly... No offence OP.

We can go into near infinite detail in this one: Oh people were shorter back then, you can't use tank Y as a stand in for tank X (even though there are no surviving tank X's), that ship in the background seen for 1,2 second is modern, that thing didn't happen or that thing did happen, but to a different person at another time, that unit didn't exist and so on and so on...

There was a time when this was more acceptable. Movies made in the 1950s often use surplus US equipment as German, for example. I remember one where the German fighters were in fact (quite real) P-47s. Nowadays, this is entirely unnecessary due to CGI. If anything I'm getting more, not less picky as there is no excuse for using the wrong aircraft, for example, since it's animated anyway. 

This will become more and more true, not less true. I'm really thinking about this as a primary thing going forward since the models have to be made anyway, so I won't give a modern movie a pass for using the wrong model now since it literally takes 5 minutes with google to pick the right one, which is a pretty low bar for a 100 million dollar movie to be held to.

Go back to movies where muzzle-loading cannon almost universally shoot magical, exploding rounds, when they could CGI balls skipping through the ranks, instead (but dumb moviegoers expect all artillery to explode). Heck, they do this with medieval combat in film/TV---they have to have catapults always shooting things on fire for the same reason, hits need to "explode." It's really distracting when you know better. 

2 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

And offcourse a very accurate movie, can make a dumb mistake whereas even a less accurate movie can get something right.

Personally I'd say... if I want historical accuracy, I should watch documentaries... Movies, to varying degrees of historical accuracy, try to tell stories.

I don't disagree here, but as technology improves, the excuses for doing this really wrong become fewer and fewer. If you need to have your animators build 20 different vehicles for a film anyway, having them build 10 wrong ones because they look cooler than what they should be is pretty inexcusable to me. There was a WW1 airplane movies a few years ago... seeing the trailer made me not see the movie, because all the German planes were Fokker DR1s. If I ever see it on TV maybe I'll watch some of it.

2 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

Doesn't mean we can't discuss technicalities and details as much as we want, but I just don't think it's reason to get worked up about.

It depends, obviously. a movie with a great, and "realistic" story (both from a historical and/or from a personal perspective) can survive technical issues for the greater truth of the history or experiences, obviously. Some stories get very derailed for me when technology is wrong, though. Pearl Harbor is an example of a movie I cannot abide on multiple levels... just watch Tora, Tora, Tora! instead.