The Last Samurai

[pkt]

Guess what I found in the store today.
A rather thick - 160 pages! - magazine of the movie. There are some historical fotos. It's almost half-an-inch thick. Costs: USD15/CAD20.
OK, I admit, I'm a sucker. I bought one because of the female lead...I'll leave it at that.

PK

[Popper]

I think the film is going to be good one.. even if not entirely historically correct.

[40Saberthieves]

What films are historically correct?

[Soldier]

"Gettysburg" with Jeff Bridges, Martin Sheen, and a few others I can't remember, based on Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels". An excellent, admittedly five-hour movie. The only thing that really makes it fiction is that nobody of course has records of that many conversations; the dialogue is taken as much as possible from actual journals, letters, etc., and then "reconstructed" further by the author. Every major event is completely accurate.

"Gods and Generals", the recently released prequel, was a severe disappointment that did the book (By Jeff Shaara, Michael's son) a severe injustice.

An interesting read sometime might be "Gone for Soldiers", followed by "Gods and Generals", then "The Killer Angels" and finally "The Last Full Measure". This is not the order the books came out in, but goes from following Capt. Robert E. Lee through the Mexican war, to chronologically through the entire Civil War. All follow the same "historical fiction" idea. Most recently published (and the only one I haven't read) was "Rise to Rebellion", which does the same with the American Revolution.

[pkt]

According to what I've read, the director of "Master and Commander:The Far side of the World" try to make the film as historically correct as possible. They hired a Canadian historical buff who specialises in ships of the 1812/Napoleonic era to make certain everything is ship-shape. Even down to the sounds of the canons being fired. What you hear in the movie are actual canons of that vintage being fired since there was no correct sound in the sound library.

I've yet to read the magazine I bought, but judging from the inital perusal, they've tried to do it as historically correct too. This is relatively easy as there are make reenactment societies in Japan as in N. America. See the Dec. issue of National Geographic. They have no shame: NG did a sort of tie-in with "The Last Samurai".

I'm sure there were many historically correct movies. One that immediately come to mind is "The Longest Day" and scores of the WWII movies. "Das Boot", "Battle of Britain", "Sinking of the Bismarck" which I saw 5 times at matinee in HK - The Hood, a battleship, no less, got blown up with one shell from the Bismarck! Most odf these post-war movies about WWII are fairly correct historically. they had to be. Too many people were there...

PK

[civiltech]

I hear "Saving Private Lynch" was a historically accurate film as well.

Definitely one for the History books........

[pkt]

As the Globe and Mail's tag line says, Depends on your perspective.

It is, if you view if from the Pentagon.
It isn't, if you view it from Private Lynch's eyes.

One has to learn to "make use of statistics". Or, in plain English, as the title of the book says, "How to Lie with Statistics".

Are you coming to the Dec 5-7 tournament in Vancouver?

PK

[canthidefromme]

Originally posted by Soldier
"Gettysburg" with Jeff Bridges, Martin Sheen, and a few others I can't remember, based on Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels". An excellent, admittedly five-hour movie. The only thing that really makes it fiction is that nobody of course has records of that many conversations; the dialogue is taken as much as possible from actual journals, letters, etc., and then "reconstructed" further by the author. Every major event is completely accurate.

"Gods and Generals", the recently released prequel, was a severe disappointment that did the book (By Jeff Shaara, Michael's son) a severe injustice.

An interesting read sometime might be "Gone for Soldiers", followed by "Gods and Generals", then "The Killer Angels" and finally "The Last Full Measure". This is not the order the books came out in, but goes from following Capt. Robert E. Lee through the Mexican war, to chronologically through the entire Civil War. All follow the same "historical fiction" idea. Most recently published (and the only one I haven't read) was "Rise to Rebellion", which does the same with the American Revolution.

I thought Killer Angels was written by the son and Gods and Generals and Last Full Measure by the father.
But nevertheless, Gods and Generals sucks.

[lochinvar]

Originally posted by pkt
(snip)- The Hood, a battleship, no less, got blown up with one shell from the Bismarck! Most odf these post-war movies about WWII are fairly correct historically. they had to be. Too many people were there...

PK

HMS Hood was, properly speaking, a battlecruiser, not a battleship. The principle behind the battle cruiser was to give it the big guns of a battleship but leave out the massive armor, on the thinking that it would be fast enough to outrun whatever it couldn't outshoot.

A shell from Bismark found a seam in the armor and penetrated all the way to the magazine--a super lucky shot that took Hood down instantly.

But as for post-war movies about WWII being accurate...you should have listened to my dad laugh whenever those movies came on TV in his later years. He was there, and he delighted in pointing out all the inconsistencies and mistakes.

One memorable one for him was a scene showing a B17-A taking off, then interior scenes of a B17-G, finishing with showing a B17-C landing--and all of these were supposed to be the same airplane. That one used to really crack him up.

[Soldier]

Originally posted by canthidefromme
I thought Killer Angels was written by the son and Gods and Generals and Last Full Measure by the father.
But nevertheless, Gods and Generals sucks.

Nope, the father wrote The Killer Angels, and has since died. The son picked it up several years later with the rest of them.

Just goes to show you...write historical fiction about the Civil War, and eventually you'll die!

[pkt]

loch,

I planted the battleship bit to see who'd pick it up. It wasn't a seam in the armour. I think it went down one of the funnels.

Yes, another instance of TV shows being fast and loose with the planes were the "6-Million-Dollar Man". He'd take off in one type of plane and land with that. But in mid-flight it was a different type of plane completely. It's been a long time, I forgot which is what, but I think it involved a single-engined plane and a 2-engined plane.

I also hate it when they used the Harvards to pretend they are Mitsubishi Zeros or whatever Luftwaffe plane, usu. Me109 something.

PK

[neevel]

There's a fair amount of uncertainty about precisely where the shell that did the Hood in actually hit (only a handful of crew survived, and the wreck wasn't located until a couple of years ago). The most basic salient fact was that the Hood's deck armor, which had been designed back in WWI when the range at which ships could accurately engage a target was much shorter, was woefully deficient against shells plunging in from the longer ranges that had since become possible. There is speculation about a torpedo launcher located in the general area of where the explosion started-- it wasn't well protected and the torpedoes might have been able to produce an primary explosion and fire sufficient to touch-off the main magazine explosion that sank her. Given the relative weakness of her horizontal protection, a shell finding a path right to the magazine would've been a real possibility too.

At any rate, a shell going down the funnel would not produce such an explosion. The engines and the magazines are well separated, and AP shells do not contain a very large bursting charge (they need to be mostly steel, with a hard AP cap atop a softer steel body, to penetrate effectively). A shell bursting in an engine room would certainly damage the ship's propulsion, but even if it managed to cause a boiler explsion, that wouldn't be sufficient to break the Hood in two. You need a magazine explosion to accomplish that.

-Dave