Real Life Cinema

This graph at Information is Beautiful compares movies that claim to be based on actual events to the courses of those actual events to see how real they are.

As you can see, it varies. And by clicking on a particular spot in the movie, a pop-up will explain how any particular scene in question either matches or deviates from reality. The graph creators researched the movie scenes for accuracy using books they were based on or other resources that describe the actual events. They give a range of options, allowing for some scenes that mix truth and falsehood as well as those which are either dead on or blatant falsehoods. And they have a category for scenes they could neither prove nor disprove because the information isn't available.

The explanatory blurbs at the bottom suggest that the crew behind the graphs will work on some other movies as well. That could be interesting, as sometimes the "true events" named in the promotional material are so drastically altered that the move isn't anything like "true." I can't remember the flick in question, but several years ago a friend after seeing a particularly partisan movie posted that the alleged actions taken by the characters representing real-life United States intelligence agents greatly angered him. I'm pretty sure I never saw the movie, but as he described it I would have been angry watching those scenes as well.

Unfortunately, when I was reading some interviews and articles with the people on whose accounts the movie was based, as well as some of their own reflections on the events it's supposed to show, it turned out that the movie version of those incidents was, well, wrong. It had shifted its pieces around so much that when they were put together they formed an entirely different puzzle. So that rather than being angry at what really happened, I would have been angry at what the screenwriter and producer had said happened, and they had crafted their version of events to evoke exactly that response. We usually call this "fiction," and it's a fine art form. But while things that happen in fiction sometimes resemble events that happened in real life, they aren't based on them. They're still the products of the creativity of the writer, artist, musician or moviemaker. It doesn't make them fake.

But it doesn't make them real, either.