It could have been so much better without the overuse of stock footage and the romance subplot.

My biggest nuisance with that movie was that it was SO nationalistic. A lot of war movies tend to do this, but I had to watch Battle of Britain in multiple go's, simply because the heavy 'the british are the best people in the world' content.

But if you take into account the most craptacular war movies ever came out during the 1970's, Battle of Britain really is jewel. The aircraft stuff truly is amazing, and I have to see another war movie that has made it so authentic and real.

Other accurate war movies:
1) Stalingrad (1992)
2) Downfall
3) Fury (Minus the last act)
4) Jarhead

Funny enough, this morning I was watching a program about a guy that supplied some of the kit for the film Fury.
He was at pains to stress that everything was authentic, from his Hetzer jagdpanzer to the coke cola bottles.

http://www.warhistoryonline.com/press-releases/63438.html

I liked parts of it. What I didn't like was the cheap feel of the movie. I don't expect 100% historic accuracy; I do understand that you have to make due with what is available but reusing Tora Tora Tora film and some of the stock footage was just way off.

The 'love story' was what turned me off. The event was big enough without adding some kind of pseudo forbidden love portion. If you want to do that then crate a 'War and Rememberance' type of war drama but this movie was trying to be like Tora Tora Tora with a little bit of In Harm's Way added in.

I might have liked it more if I hadn't seen Tora Tora Tora first.

+1 Wklink

"Midway" was a like a cheap college drama class production by comparison to Tora.

Fury was not that accurate. The final scene was really over the top but there were quite a few tactical errors present in the game. A Tiger would have known that the biggest threat to it would have been an upgunned 76mm Sherman and Fury's tank would have been the first one hit. American armor was never used in the manner it was portrayed and rarely were tank forces sent that far out in front of supporting infantry.

I highly question the treatment of German POWs as well. The idea of shooting every German soldier that wore a US piece of equipment was ludicrous. In 1945 the Wehrmacht and particularly the Volkssturm were using any piece of clothing they could find. It was not uncommon to find German troops wearing US coats at the end of the war. If it was found, it was worn.

This is correct. There were quite a few Germans who were tried, convicted and hanged for being spies but it was a minority of the total number of Germans who were found wearing US uniforms.

According to stories from my uncle, grandfather and great grandfather (2 in the german armed forces and one a prisoner in a concentration camp) shooting german POWs or civilians because they were german was commmon practice. Raping girls and pillaging homes and people from 'liberated' countries as well. Fury accurately displays that there was no good side or bad side in World War 2. Or in war in general. That a Hollywood film breaks this taboo subject is amazing by itself, and that a well established actor with an image to uphold is the main actor (Brad Pitt), made it even more amazing when I watched it.

I remember the mindfck that people had when Saving Private Ryan came out, and the 'gritty-ness' and how depressing it portrayed the second world war. I can only imagine of how far we will come in another 20 years.

But yeah, everything that happens in the last act is just utter crap. I just fast forwarded that part of the movie until the ending.

Too bad, since the reason I started watching that movie is that I heard that they used a real Tiger in one of those scenes =/

Fury sucked partly because there weren't any likable characters in it.

You may want to rephrase that. There indeed is no ENTIRELY good or ENTIRELY bad side but there's no doubt that the Allies in general were the good and just side while the Axis were not.

The problem with a film is that a screenwriter may hear of something happening, maybe it happened twice in the entire war, and they put it in the film.
Viewers then think that for some reason anything they see was a common occurrence, and not maybe a rare thing that was just put in for the dramatic effect.

Any film that's not a documentary is fiction. At a bare minimum, we don't know verbatim what all the people involved said. We don't know how they all felt, every single thing they did. Even people who were there forget stuff with time. Therefore a lot is made up to fill in the blanks.
Some are more obvious about it than others, but in every case if adhering to reality ruins the feel of the film then it will be changed or omitted.

The director is telling a story and wants particular feelings evoked in both individual scenes and the film as a whole. If something gets in the way of that, it gets cut out, plain and simple. Notice how much drier most documentaries are, how much less emotion they generate? Just because you think it could've been done without it getting in the way is immaterial because no investors gave you multiple millions of dollars to make the film, they entrusted the director with their money to make a larger amount of money back.

You are free to make your own 100% accurate film if you can get the funding yourself, there is no law or rule against it.

Just remember those investors see worse ROI's on every film that leans more heavily on real and less on fiction and are wary of it. Is it accurate? Is it good? That's nice, will it make MONEY?



The Jedi Master

To throw out something a little more modern: The Hurt Locker. Just not even a little bit close to reality.

You may want to rephrase that. There indeed is no ENTIRELY good or ENTIRELY bad side but there's no doubt that the Allies in general were the good and just side while the Axis were not.

Wow, glad someone said THAT. No bad side? Over 8 million people murdered in concentration camps? The massacre and rape of tens of thousands in Nanking China? Mass executions of prisoners of war?
Yeah, I think its safe to that WW2 was the last war where there actually WAS a good and a bad side.

What about Bat 21 ?

Great cherry-picking of war crimes there Pooch!

Whether or not it was realistic, Battle of the Bulge was popular with the veterans who actually participated.

The error of the film is that it is the tactical view of the action by vignette (most of which were popular stories, regardless of accuracy) taken to portray the strategic events. They did this to have the most appeal to veterans and their families (everyone knew someone who served in the ETO), jumping all over the place. Just about every unit got their thirty seconds on film by name or type.

And veterans at the time did NOT want a realistic portrayal shown to their families. Dad came home, put up his uniform, and started the Baby Boom - he wanted the reality of his wartime experience as watered down as his new suburban lawn.

This is why Band of Brothers worked. It concentrated on just a few members of a unit and followed them with just a fig leaf thrown at the strategic events around them. This rang true to me, as a line doggie nobody every took me to a big map and explained the Big Picture.

Germans telling stories about allied atrocities? You could knock me over with a feather.

Dunno about that. I have read some pretty horrifying accounts of soviet troops behavior at the end in Germany.....encouraged by high command.

The Soviets are a different matter and they did indeed commit a lot of atrocities with the two most infamous in my opinion being the Katyn Massacre and the rape of over one million women after the fall of Berlin.

In every society there are miscreants and evil people. The US is not immune to that.

If humans were part of the for example US Army in WWII, then some percentage of those US Army humans committed crimes while wearing his country's uniform. It's just so.

But the difference between that and Imperial Japan's policies or nazi Germany's policies should be very self-evident.