Dan Snow Rates the Best Historical Films of All Time

It is important to say that this story is in no way rooted in

historical

fact. Houston we had a problem. I probably wouldn't keep a sniper like that in a church tower. I love this speech, but it doesn't make sense, it's a salad of words. Hi, I'm Dan Slow. this is the most important one. I'm reviewing the five

best

historical

films

of all

time

as voted for by you. Gladiator, such a good movie, so historically inaccurate, but who cares, this seems very powerful. Commodus was, in fact, a poor emperor of Rome, a megalomaniac inherited from his father.

Marcus Aurelius has no evidence that he killed his father and, in fact, there is no evidence that his father did not want him to rule after him because his father had actually raised him and in some ways had anointed as heir. Commodus, surprisingly, entered the arena as a gladiator which was shocking for an emperor because gladiators were traditionally slaves and prisoners of war. My name is Maximus Desmos Meridius. Now he may not know it, but Russell Crowe may have mispronounced Maximus Decimus Meridius. It could be that Meredith is referring to someone from Mérida in Spain, but he sounds great, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant of the real Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

I love this speech, but it doesn't make sense, it's a salad of words. There was a Felix Legion, one of the legions was known as Felix, the lucky Legion particularly served under the emperor. of Vespasian but there was no general of Felix's Legions and there really was no commander of the northern armies at this point in the Roman Empire, you see the Praetorian Guard here, the Pratorian Guards are absolutely part of Roman history from this point They are bodyguards of the emperor but in reality they have great instability they require constant bribes they assassinated emperors they auctioned the title of emperor at one point to the highest bidder they dressed in purple they are seen as elite bodyguards but they are just a group of jokers, a group of troublemakers who spend more

time

killing emperors and saving their lives and this part shows the famous thumbs up or thumbs down for gladiators.

It's true that people could show Mercy. Thumbs up is now thought to mean Kill so you know to use your sword to push your sword. The thumbs down was actually meant to sheath your weapon, but the filmmakers decided that we're familiar with thumbs up being positive, so they just went with thumbs up, which means saving the Alien Gladiator spare. I think the film also accurately portrays the amphitheater, gambling is an important part of Roman life, Roman emperors organized games and entertainments to keep the crowds happy, make the people of Rome admire them, to strengthen their rule and they.

He also gave out free bread at these things, so the games and what happened in the coliseums were a powerful method of control in the Roman capital. Finally we will return to where we belong, the Colosseum, a wonderful scene, this great performance by Ollie Reed next is a kind of rudyaris, he is a former gladiator who has been given freedom, he fought in so many fights that he finally freed him and in this The movie says that Marcus Aurelius Libertad himself gave him a wooden sword and that was Rudy's. It was a wooden sword that he handed over.

Silence before he hits and the noise then increases and he explains to Maximus how he can gain freedom from him because you are a slope. Gladiators are slaves or captured war prisoners or slaves. They had no control over their Fate they could be massacred in the Colosseum and in the arena at any time their only way of freedom is to become a celebrity to become a great Gladiator win all their fights I would continue and they would give me their symbol of freedom from your freedom, there you have it, you see the wooden sword given to all the ancient gladiators who managed to survive the grueling and gruesome experience that was fighting in the arena.

Sometimes the emperor gave a wooden sword, but not all the time. It was not the

best

because I killed quickly I was the best because the crowd loved me and Proximo is right it was Spectacle this was entertainment in Rome bloody entertainment it is accurate to say that Marcus Aurelius had banned gladiatorial combat in Rome it was reintroduced by Commodus, his son, Gladiator, it's a powerful and wonderful movie, but it's more of a fantasy. Rome, as shown, didn't really feel like the story hadn't happened. Commodus was not killed by a gladiator in the arena, the Republic was not restored in the end.

It is a wonderful but crazy story, however I think some elements give you an idea of ​​what life was like in the Roman Empire and there is a description of the life and training of the gladiators and the conditions in which they were kept. I think it's really interesting. Fantastic again, we've seen space movies more recently but this is just a fantastic depiction of space travel, but at the time it was groundbreaking, they go through a routine procedure and a small glitch causes a small explosion. This is a great moment when you see them. talking to his ground control who was in Houston in Texas, this is Houston, uh, I repeat, please, Houston, we have a problem, it's one of the great lines, one of the great moments in Hollywood history, Tom Hanks playing to Jim Lovell, says Houston, we had a problem and in fact, If the line was good Houston, we had a problem here and it actually came from swiger, he was the first to tell Houston about the problem.

Yes, we have multiple warnings and advisories to Houston. We have one key reset and precision. the film is that there is some drama there is some tension between Lovell and Swagger that he seems to blame the other for the accident in reality apparently that did not happen there was no friction between the members of the flight crew they are all on the place they continue to approach the cardan. I keep losing the radio signal. Your antenna should be 22. You will have to do it manually. Our mission. There is a mission control that is in Houston, Texas.

That's the set. It's something perfect. Almost done for Last Detail um they wanted to film it at the original Mission Control but now it's a Historic Landmark and they couldn't risk filming there and it's a little small so they rebuilt it and took precise measurements and replicated it. in a set, so it looks perfect. I know this sequence works, John, the sequence looks good, we're slightly over budget at three or four amps, so you see Ken Matthew in the scene now who was supposed to be on the Apollo 13 mission. but he was exposed to German measles before he left and, again, I think the movie is a little unfair.

The surgeon is portrayed here as a risk-averse guy, but in reality measles was incredibly serious at the time and developing measles would have put all of their lives in extreme danger, which is why Apollo 13 was the program's seventh crude mission. Apollo spacecraft, was the third to land on the Moon and was launched on April 11, 1970 from Kennedy. in Florida and then, eerily, on April 13th there was a failure, there was an explosion. I interviewed an astronaut who said it. They give it an 8 out of 10 for its accuracy. That's high praise from him. They go so far as to try to use. original transcripts film some scenes in the so-called vomit Comet and plane that replicates the effect of zero gravity uh it is based on the book by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell The Lost Moon is an account of what happened when that mission failed Lovell was really satisfied with the movie, in fact he said it's amazing the instrument panels, the consoles, that's exactly how things look inside that spaceship Apollo 13 is an extraordinary movie because you know how it ends, everyone knows they survive and, However, they generate tension so effectively that it is a brilliant description of space travel, it is a brilliant description of teamwork, professionalism, the experience required to send humans to the Moon, unimaginable with the technology they had at their disposal. at that moment and it's also just a brilliant performance, you really root for these guys and they're excited when they land safely, they come back to Earth overseas.

This is an incredibly powerful scene that shows the type of warfare the British had to master if they wanted to survive in North America and shows how bad they were. Initially, in a world of shifting loyalties, this suggests that Magwell was their ferret guide. He turns against them. There is an army that leads them into an ambush. The superior fighting skills of the indigenous people are on display. The British try to line up and fight as they would. on European battlefields firing volumes of muskets in the front row, kneeling ranks behind them standing and in a densely forested landscape like North America, that is completely inappropriate, it is easy to take shelter behind trees and logs, hide in the folds of the landscape and then take advantage of the time spent reloading to attack Close Quarters with the Tomahawk bayonet knife, you see a British unit cut to pieces here oh, this happened in the French Indian War, the Seven Years War in North America, some units were completely wiped out in the irregular combats you find yourself in.

In forests like this, look at those red coats wearing heavy red wool coats, too hot in summer, not warm enough in winter, the bricks were not properly equipped, they were not trained for this type of warfare that the Native Americans. masters of hand-to-hand fighting, I think they would have been enormously effective scalping, that was a practice that took place, this shows the confusion of the fighting on the border, there would have been countless episodes like this militia fighting groups indigenous people, war bands that tripped over each other. ambushing each other and here comes Hawkeye his adoptive father and his brother supremely good warriors Hawkeye played by Donald Day Lewis in one of the Great Performances of him I can't believe he hasn't won an Oscar for this foreign.

I really like this scene because If it describes the dire predicament that the indigenous peoples of the Americas have found themselves in since Europeans first landed on the continent, it is trying to balance the needs of diplomacy and statecraft with anger of his young men to wage war. to expand their power within North America, but also not to inflame tensions with the Europeans, the French, the British, the American colonists who are fighting for power in North America right now. Fox is not lying, I am brief, as Michael says, Native American groups are fighting among themselves for primacy, the Hurons this represents are a tribe that lives in present-day Ontario, probably north of the Great Lakes, and are bitter enemies of the Iroquois Confederacy, which is further south, in parts of Monday, New York and Pennsylvania. and they have an ongoing generational struggle between them, um, which is aided by the fact that the Iroquois, particularly the Mohawk, generally support the British, the American settlers, and the Hurons are sort of allies with the French settlers in Canada.

The French merchants are masters. in Europe is infected with the disease of greed, so the Huron chief is constantly trying to balance the interests of his tribe, competition with other indigenous groups and competition with the newcomers, the British and the French, the spelled , which is a record of days. of my father's people speak only my truth, surely it is true that they would have debated what to do with the prisoners and sometimes the prisoners were executed in an agonizing way, other times they were freed, um and I think this scene is also very intelligent because it talks about the role of Maguire, the ambition of the young people, the chiefs were not absolute rulers, they could not simply command and be obeyed, and there were dissident groups within these tribes, as they were within British and French society of ambitious young people, often ambitious and aggressive.

That would disobey their Boss and go to carry out raids and attacks on other groups and inflamed situations, so these Bosses had to handle very difficult and very volatile situations. It's a big moment, two British women and a British officer have been captured and Hawkeye enters this year and Village. to try to negotiate, to try to convince the Hurons to release them, in the end the British officer sacrificed himself for a woman he loves but she doesn't love him. It is important to say that this story is in no way rooted in historical fact, it is only inspired by a particular period of American colonial history Marston Aikens is a made-up story, so it is accurate in that sense, but it is an insight magnificent of the war of The Life of Death on the frontier in the 1750s the shifting alliances between indigenous groups France and Britain as they sought to forge empires in the new world it is a beautifully shot film the costumes the landscapes the tools transport us to the 1750s andThey give us a wonderful description of what life and death, etc. were like. on the left side of the ghetto B Surplus labor elderly and sick mostly, which is where you'll want to start, eh?

Even by Holocaust standards, he's one of the psychopathic, sadistic, evil SS camp commanders Of course, the men in the barracks near the quarry, the women on the other side like well, yes, sir, well, yes, it's a village we call Villa, the synagogue, these concentration camps are places where the Jews, but other persecutory minorities, were housed in appalling conditions and received barely enough food to survive, sometimes less food than necessary to survive and were forced to carry out slave labor, many were sent from camps like this to extermination camps where They were massacred industrially, but in places like this the emphasis would be on working to inflict suffering and humiliation and, although they were not designed as extermination camps, life expectancy could increase. will be measured in a matter of weeks of all this backbreaking work in the Manual Village, who among you has domestic experience?

In this part we see him selecting a kind of servant for among the Jews and this is based on a real character, she would work for Schindler and here it is suggested, although we do not see that many of these women would enter sexual slavery, as well as the guards and officials from the SS camp they would select women from among the inmates on the campus you see people put to work in these camps, they built very, very fragile accommodations, which were insufficient to keep people alive and warm during the winter, and then you see the punishment imposed on anyone who dared to complain or stand up. even the authorities Dr.

Barracks collapse and then collapse you are an engineer yes, my name is Diana haita I am a graduate in civil engineering from the University of Milan, I also have studies, the example of a young Jewish woman is an engineer who tells you how it should be built a reminder that you know that many of the professional classes of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, were Jews, they would have had careers and lives. Engineers, physicists, doctors ended up working as slaves in fields like this foreign, yes, Mecca, it is a terrifying scene. Do you realize that anyone who ends up on this list can survive the war?

Anyone not on the list is immediately condemned, as the Nazis carried out their gigantic genocide program of annihilation of an entire people. The same thing I'm doing. You could even make money from it. I don't know, come on, Julius. I know about the extra food and clothing you give them and pay for out of your own pocket. If we do a combined approach, we could get over four thousand from mine with yours. could relocate them to something like safety and wonder, this important reminder that the Holocaust was not just about the murder of Jews, it was about exploiting their labor, it's about barbaric labor practices and on the way to those death chambers where they are expected to work. and support German industries and munitions and there were some industrialists some companies did very well with that I can't do that I won't accept it every Holocaust survivor I know tells you about that strange moment of Fortune's luck that saw them survive, the They were taken from the masses while their families, their friends, their communities were murdered.

The film has a generous performance by Oscar Schindler. The fact is that he was a Nazi, he was a worker, he was taking advantage of this Jewish labor, but he did it. saved these people and created a list, created a list, it was found hidden in an attic and Schindler had hidden it there just before his death in 1974. And we know that from before the war there is evidence that Schindler was not a An avowed Nazi he did not believe in the destruction of all the Jews of Europe. It was a coincidence that the accountant, when he met him for the first time in 1939, told him: I am Jewish, so you know, I have to tell you that I am Jewish and Shindo.

It's kind of silly, you know, it doesn't matter, so it seems that from the beginning Schindler thought that the Nazi regime was going unimaginably too far in its ambition to destroy the Jewish people. Stephen's people have a very tough job here because he had to portray the horrors of the Holocaust, which he does absolutely brilliantly, but if he had actually shown how bad it was, it wouldn't have been watchable, it would have been too terrible to put into action. screen camps like this, would have been even worse than what is portrayed and It was said that in this particular camp one could hardly look at the sky and avoid the number of corpses hanging by the neck from various high points around the foreign camp so in this clip we see the terrible aftermath of the assault on Omaha with bodies strewn on the beach discarded equipment blood in shallow waters and the camera focuses on Orion is a highly invented character Loosely based on a young man from the Nyland family, one of the four children who fought in World War II and then we return to the United States the war department where messages of condolence are sent to people telling families that their loved ones have died the untimely death of their son no word from me will ever be able feel relief has lost tremendously was an excellent soldier and believed very strongly, but it is no longer a secret, that we were involved in one of the most important events: something like this really happened: three members of the New York nylon family were murdered or declared missing in June 1944, during the invasion of Normandy, one in Burma there was a fourth member of the nylon family and the American government decided to remove him and remove him from the Normandy battlefield, so this film is loosely based on the nylon brothers, these fragments of Spielberg's very moving classic tug at the heartstrings, an image of rural America and A traditional housewife in the kitchen, a simple, honest and patriotic family and the car stops at the dusty road and the mother knows immediately what it is.

It is a simple scene but it is very shocking that the news that is brought is not just one sun but three. lost their lives, all four were in the same company in the 29th division, but we split them up after the Sullivan brothers died in daily contact with the fourth son, James, no sir, and then the senior American commanders take the decision to withdraw the last one. brother despite the family and maybe also spare the US military some terrible news, much of this scene is made up and our inaccuracies here, but it is an impressive piece of filmmaking and there are elements that are very accurate.

One thing that is strange is that Tom Hanks' character would have been about 10 years younger than him in this movie. The age of these junior officers. These junior officers would have been there in their 20s. You also see the devastation that fell on these villages and in the cities there has been a gigantic concentration of bombing in this area before and after D-Day. They would have been fighting house to house, room to room, there was a brutal urban war, they dispersed , You know what to do? We have to get on the rabbit. and I think it is also true that in the days following D-Day there were isolated groups of paratroopers, there were units advancing on land and they often faced powerful lightly armed German counterattacks with rifles, machine guns, bazookas against armor.

As the Germans desperately threw heavy forces into battle to try to push the Allies back into sea control, the actors received training with 1940s equipment, weapons kits, you can see their familiarity with these objects, their Movements are so fluid when fighting a built up area. areas like this harder cocktails molotov cocktails are very effective tanks don't have much room to maneuver and you can trap them, cut them down and try to destroy them by hitting vulnerable parts of the tank, you can see the german infantry operating up close with tanks, they would ride on the tanks , they would try to use the tanks as cover against small arms fire, which is probably quite accurate and must have been terrifying in Normandy when isolated groups of infantry paratroopers found themselves attacked by German armor.

You just can't penetrate those helmets, you're very vulnerable, in fact you probably wouldn't keep a sniper like that in a church tower for very long because after the first few kills it becomes very clear where he is. They'd actually try to move around a bit more instead of just being isolated in a church spy, although that's what we often think. The strange thing about Saving Private Ryan is that, for a movie that spends a lot of time talking about historical accuracy, the battle at the end is made up, it's pretty inaccurate, so the Battle of Ramil shown didn't take place, there's no place called Romel, is fictional and was filmed on a disused airfield in Hatfield and England, but is Very loosely based on a battle that took place just after D-Day, one of many battles, intense fighting finds a place after the D-Day.

On June 9, the 82nd 101st Airborne engaged the German 91st Division who were trying to counterattack by trying to push the Allies back into the sea and that battle was fought at Samara, a place where the paratroopers had landed and held on despite repeated German counterattacks, the troops that the German troops you see attacking here are SS Das Reich, which was an elite German unit, but in reality it wasn't, it wasn't in Normandy Still, it was in southern France or central France and was moving slowly through France to try to engage the Allies, but being hampered by railways being blown up by resistance fighters and intense aerial bombardment.

I can see why this has been voted one of the best historical

films

of all time. Nothing had ever portrayed World War II the way this movie portrayed the war, its attention to detail. the use of special effects when working with veterans to try to recreate what that battlefield sounded like felt incredibly impactful to audiences when this film was released and I think it still gives us one of the best depictions of combat ever. cinema