Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors expose cinema’s most spectacular departures from historical truth
The Man Who Invented Christmas
Newspaper headlines were a 20th-century invention
At precisely 10 minutes and 3 seconds into this 2017 comedy drama about Charles Dickens and the writing of A Christmas Carol, I witnessed something that made me gasp in horror. Arriving at his club, Dickens (Dan Stevens) wants to avoid a conversation with rival author William Makepeace Thackeray (Miles Jupp), so he hides his face with a newspaper, little knowing the front page’s headline: ‘CHARLES DICKENS’.
It’s just a throwaway sight gag but, to a media historian, it’s as jarring as if he had pulled out an iPad. Nineteenth-century newspapers simply didn’t have headlines as we know them today. Open up a copy of the Daily News – a paper founded and edited by Dickens – and you’ll find a densely packed wall of text. Like many papers at the time, its front page was filled with hundreds of tiny adverts. It was well into the 20th century before headlines became common, and The Times didn’t print news on its front page until 1966.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), Netflix’s Enola Holmes (2020), and ITV’s Victoria (2016–19) all reproduce the same anachronism. Worse still, their newspapers feature illustrations, which were virtually unheard of in the daily press.
I understand why filmmakers do it, and I’m sure most viewers won’t notice or care, but this is the smallest hill I’m willing to die on.
Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University
Braveheart
The costumes are ridiculously anachronistic: kilts were introduced only in the late 16th century
This rousing 1995 epic tells the story of the Scots rebel Sir William Wallace (c1274–1305), who fought against the wicked and exploitative King Edward I of England. A fabulously exciting and romantic adventure with a gorgeous soundtrack, it won five Oscars. It does not, though, transport us to the Middle Ages.
Angus Macfadyen, who plays Robert the Bruce, offers a voiceover comment that “historians from England will say I am a liar”. But scholarly criticism of the film is not based on English jingoism – it’s based on the fact that the film simply gets a lot of its facts wrong. We’re told that the Scottish king Alexander III died by 1280, and had no sons; in reality, he died in 1286 and had two sons. We’re told that William Wallace was of poor peasant stock; he was actually a minor nobleman.
Edward I reclaimed the right to interrupt Scottish weddings so that English aristocrats could ravish the bride, according to the movie: this is fabricated. In the film, the battle of Stirling Bridge is fought in another location entirely – nowhere near a bridge. Isabella of France is shown falling in love with Wallace: at the time of his execution in 1305, she was around nine years old and living in France.
The costumes are ridiculously anachronistic, too. Kilts were introduced only in the late 16th century. Blue face paint may possibly have been used 1,000 years earlier, but certainly not in the early 14th century. Having said all that, Braveheart is a great watch, and brilliantly evocative – I’m just not sure what it’s actually evoking!
Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford
Mary Queen of Scots
There was no meeting – in person or of minds – with Elizabeth I
Just a day after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots staked her own claim to the English throne. This set the tone for a rivalry that dominated the next three decades, culminating in Mary’s execution on Elizabeth’s orders in 1587. As female sovereigns battling for survival in a male-dominated age, they had much in common. In other respects, they couldn’t have been more different. Put simply, Elizabeth ruled with the head, Mary with the heart.
The drama of their relationship reads like a soap opera: little wonder it has inspired generations of screenwriters. The most recent movie offering, released in 2018, stars Saoirse Ronan in the title role and Margot Robbie as her English counterpart. As is so often the case, Mary is portrayed as a tragic heroine rather than the architect of her own downfall.
A number of other inaccuracies are littered throughout the film, the most irritating of which is a scene in which Elizabeth stares wistfully down at her stomach, imagining herself pregnant. This flies in the face of compelling evidence that she harboured a deep-seated aversion to marriage and childbirth. The film also conveys a very 21st-century sense of female solidarity in a patriarchal world – something that played little part in Elizabeth and Mary’s relationship.
But the biggest inaccuracy of all is the scene in which the two queens meet. The whole point of Elizabeth and Mary’s relationship is that they never did meet – if they had, things might have turned out very differently. They relied on letters, ambassadorial reports and rumour to build a picture of each other and chart the treacherous waters of Anglo-Scottish politics and diplomacy. Yet in the film they come together (in an abandoned barn!) for a highly charged exchange during which they express vulnerability, jealousy and sisterhood. It might be the emotional climax of the film, but it made me want to throw my popcorn at the screen.
Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster
U-571
An American crew made the Enigma breakthrough? Utter nonsense
This gripping wartime drama, released in 2000, tells the story of a US Navy submarine crew on a mission to capture an Enigma machine – a coding device used by the Germans during the Second World War, which made their messages virtually indecipherable. In the film, the Americans capture a German U-boat, the U-571 of the title, to get hold of its vital code machine. When their own sub, the S-33, is sunk, they are forced onto the enemy boat. It’s also destroyed, and they are eventually rescued, with the Enigma machine, by the US Navy.
It’s a great story. But the idea that it was an American crew who made the first breakthrough with an Enigma machine is utter nonsense. That achievement belongs to Polish intelligence, who reverse engineered it and cracked the code in the early 1930s. Later, after the Germans upgraded their Enigma machines for naval use, the British got hold of the new version by capturing U-110 in an operation that was just as dramatic as any events in this film. All of this took place in 1941, before the US had even joined the war.
The real-life U-571 was never captured by the Allies, and the real-life S-33 never sailed in the Atlantic during the war. I don’t know why the writers didn’t simply make up names for their boats rather than using real ones inaccurately. Of course, there is no reason why a film has to be historically accurate: even Shakespeare modified history for the sake of a better story. But the US has quite enough to be proud of without filching other people’s achievements. This story could easily have featured British heroes without compromising any of the drama.
Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)
- Read more | Alternate history: what if Alan Turing and Bletchley Park had not cracked the Enigma code?
King Arthur
Basic facts of geographical logic are swept aside with wild abandon
This 2004 epic adds historical insult to injury by opening with the claim that “recently discovered archaeological evidence sheds light on [Arthur’s] true identity”. The action is largely set on and around Hadrian’s Wall in AD 467 – over half a century after Emperor Honorius is often thought to have pulled the last Roman troops from Britain, an event traditionally dated to 410.
Yes, there’s an argument that, if a real Arthur existed, he may have lived in the fifth century – a particularly shadowy corner of British history. But this is a film in which basic facts of geographical logic are swept aside with wild abandon, as is any sort of pretence at chronological faithfulness. The few historical details we do know about the period are whirled into a messy pulp.
And don’t even get me started on Keira Knightley’s Guinevere, clad in an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny leather bikini with a natty Iron Age torc around her neck. There’s a brief moment of historical hope when Germanus of Auxerre appears on screen. Historically speaking, he’s the real deal, and the subject of one of our only contemporary textual sources for fifth-century Britain. This Gallic bishop visited Britain around AD 429/430 with the aim of rooting out Pelagianism, a heretical form of Christianity. But here he appears several decades later, and Pelagianism seems to have mutated from a theological position (essentially the argument that there was no original sin) into some sort of political freedom movement.
I’m quite glad I didn’t have to sit through this film at the cinema, because I’d probably have attacked the screen and been escorted out of the building in disgrace.
Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024)
Pompeii
There were no blazing fireballs raining from the sky
Hollywood has never been known for strict historical accuracy, and few films make that clearer than this effects-heavy 2014 historical disaster movie. Spectacle, after all, sells. Flaming projectiles and ships crashing through city streets may make for gripping cinema – but they also blur the line between entertainment and accepted ‘fact’.
Pompeii follows the fictional Celtic gladiator Milo (Kit Harington) as he seeks revenge – and falls in love with aristocratic young Roman Cassia (Emily Browning). While the central narrative is pure invention, the film does occasionally brush against historical reality. Notably, it captures the frequent earthquakes that shook the city in the years before the fatal eruption of AD 79, and portrays the chaotic human response as disaster unfolded.
Yet where the film diverges from fact is in its depiction of the eruption itself. There were no blazing fireballs raining from the sky. Instead, pumice stones fell in vast quantities, sometimes large enough to cause fatal injuries, but not aflame. More convincingly, the film depicts the eruption’s deadly climax: the pyroclastic flows that ultimately destroyed Pompeii and its inhabitants. Even its final image, of two lovers frozen in an embrace, draws inspiration from the famous plaster casts of victims found at the site.
Other elements, however, veer far into fantasy. There is no evidence for tsunami waves hurling ships into the city streets, nor for senators meeting cinematic ends chained to chariots (in this film, one is played by Kiefer Sutherland). These embellishments may heighten the drama, but they remind us that filmic Pompeii is not the archaeological one, only a vivid, and sometimes misleading, reimagining of it.
Jess Venner, ancient historian at Oxford University and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii (Mudlark, 2026)
Pocahontas
She was indeed a cultural interlocutor – but not wholly of her own volition
When she first met English colonist John Smith in early 1607, Pocahontas was just a tween – but you wouldn’t know that from the stories that came after. In his accounts, Smith claimed that she rescued him from execution by her father, Wahunsonacock, and the Algonquian-speaking peoples he led. Never mind that Smith got her name wrong: Pocahontas was a nickname –her given name was Amonute. And never mind that Smith’s story drew on an old template used for tales of explorers in destinations ranging from Turkey to Manila.
Accuracy lost out to drama, and the legend grew with each telling. By the 19th century, storytellers had revamped it as a romance. And by the end of the 20th century, in the 1995 animated Pocahontas, Hollywood had spun it as a fairy tale – innovative in its portrayal of a self-assured Disney princess who chooses familial over romantic love, but still at the end of the day a love story of cultural encounter and national origins.
In real life, Amonute was indeed a cultural interlocutor – but not wholly of her own volition. The Jamestown colonists kidnapped her in 1613, when she was in her late teens and already married. Adapting, she learned English, divorced her Native American husband and married Englishman John Rolfe. In 1616, she and Rolfe sailed to London under the auspices of the Virginia Company. Part cultural ambassador, part curiosity, she contracted an illness – perhaps pneumonia or dysentery – and died an ocean away from home. Disney offers an appealing version of Pocahontas, but the real story trades tragedy and romance for something more layered and complex.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University
300
A story from the ancient world distorted to serve a modern purpose
Zack Snyder’s 2007 swords-and-sandals blockbuster was incredibly successfully – not least because of its stellar cast, which included Gerard Butler as the Spartan king Leonidas and Michael Fassbender, making his film debut as sidekick Stelios. The film was shot and styled as a graphic novel, and was inspired by a comic book series, but the origins of the story lie in ancient Greek history.
The focus of the film is the last stand made by 300 Spartans (actually 301 – Leonidas and 300 bodyguards) at Thermopylae against the forces led by Persian king Xerxes during the invasion of Greece in 480 BC. But though based on history, the telling of the story is inaccurate in three main ways.
First, the graphic rendering of the film makes the whole thing feel make-believe. Second, because many historical elements of the plot – those that might get in the way of building the legend of the heroic 300 Spartans – are conveniently left out. And third, because the representations of the Persian king and his forces in particular are wildly distorted to make them all look more wild, beast-like and transgressive.
These distortions reflect not only the source comic book but also the context in which the film was made, back in 2005–06. Given the political and military events of the time, especially in the US, a film that heightened the contrast between east and west – especially one that pitted east and west against one another and which, importantly, presented the west as the heroes – was welcome. This story from the ancient world was thus retooled to serve a modern purpose.
Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine