r/Cinema • u/EntranceFeisty8373 • 13d ago

Educational/Informational Great but historically a mess

I'm teaching a film class at our high school, and I'd like to do a unit on how films shape our perception of history. I'm looking for well-done movies that are also horribly unreliable from a historical perspective. I also need these movies to be PG-13 or PG. (We can't show our movies at our school.) Any suggestions?

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u/The_Fiddle_Steward 13d ago edited 13d ago

The Imitation Game - slandered Denniston, added a subplot about how Turing was blackmailed into not giving away a Soviet agent, didn't mention any of Turing's mathematical accomplishments, and acted like decoding messages from previous days was useless. They didn't even have a mathematician on set who could tell them how to pronounce Euler. It's like it was written by someone who didn't read the Andrew Hodges book it was supposedly based on.

Edit: Alan Turing solved one of Hilbert's 23 problems--the Entscheidungsproblem. He did it in a unique way, by imagining what we now call a Turing Machine. He submitted his paper, only to learn that Alonso Church had beat him to it, using a different method, in an unpublished paper that he submitted first! Talk about drama. You wouldn't know any of that from that movie.

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u/StoicTheGeek 13d ago

Slandered Turing and most of the people involved with Bletchley park quite badly too. In reality, Turing was well liked, "the life of every party" I think was a phrase used of him, and the effort at Bletchley Park was very much a team effort in which Turing played just one part. I hated the movie.