When the Message Overrode Common Sense

Not all departures from historical accuracy are the same failure. This list distinguishes between three categories that are frequently conflated in the culture war arguments surrounding these films:

The verdicts here are honest about which category each entry belongs to. Some cases that are treated as equivalent in cultural debates aren’t equivalent on examination.

My objection to these films has nothing to do with which team wins the culture war. I care about two things here. Real people who can’t answer back deserve to be shown as they were, and audiences who buy a ticket deserve a story instead of a sermon. When a film fails the first test, it’s lying about the dead. When it fails the second, it’s wasting my evening. Both are failures, in different ways, and they deserve different verdicts.

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1. Queen Cleopatra (2023) – Netflix Documentary

Cleopatra VII was Macedonian Greek, a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals. The Ptolemies were famously insular, they practiced sibling marriage to preserve their Macedonian bloodline across fifteen generations. Contemporary accounts describe her as fair-skinned.

The genetic and historical evidence isn’t ambiguous. Netflix’s documentary cast a Black British actress to portray her and, when challenged by Egyptian scholars and historians, executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith stated that she wanted to “reclaim” Cleopatra’s identity for Black women.

What makes this entry damaging is that it’s a documentary, a form that claims factual authority. A fictional film with a Black actress as Cleopatra is a creative choice. A documentary that presents Cleopatra as Black while claiming to be historically accurate is misinformation with production values. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities formally protested the film. The Egyptian government rarely protests entertainment. The falsification was sufficiently egregious to produce an official diplomatic complaint.

This one disturbs me because of who it fools. People turn to a documentary when they want to know what happened, and a student writing a school report could pull this off Netflix and cite it with a straight face. Whatever the producers intended, they spent the trust that the format earned over decades, and they spent it on a falsehood. That’s a betrayal of the viewer, and I don’t think it’s a close call.

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2. The Woman King (2022)

The Agojie were the female warrior corps of the Kingdom of Dahomey, extraordinary figures, and an unusual subject for a film.

The historical problem is that the Kingdom of Dahomey was one of West Africa’s most active participants in the Atlantic slave trade, raiding neighboring kingdoms to capture people for sale to European and American slavers. The Agojie participated in these raids. The film presents them as opponents of the slave trade and freedom fighters against colonial oppression, the opposite of what the historical record shows.

Viola Davis’s performance is excellent. The film around it is impressive as action cinema. The falsification (presenting the Agojie as anti-slavery activists when they were active slave raiders) isn’t a minor historical simplification. It inverts the historical reality entirely. The film could have been made honestly about unusual warriors who existed in morally complex circumstances. It chose to remove the complexity and replace it with a different and false story.

Viola Davis deserved a script with the nerve to show the real Agojie. What frustrates me most is how much better the honest version would’ve been. Fearsome women who were brave and also complicit in something monstrous is a film I’d have lined up for. The cleaned-up version asks nothing of me except applause, and I resent being handed a history lesson I know is wrong.

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3. Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

Ridley Scott cast Christian Bale as Moses, Joel Edgerton as Ramesses, and populated ancient Egypt with white British and Australian actors, while casting actors of Middle Eastern and African descent as servants, thieves, and assassins. When challenged, Scott said he couldn’t get financing for a $140 million film with a Middle Eastern lead, a candid admission that the casting decision was commercial, not creative, and a commercial decision that falsified the historical and geographic reality of the setting.

The real position here: Exodus commits exactly the same historical falsification as Queen Cleopatra, in the opposite direction. Ancient Egyptians were North African people. Casting them as white Europeans is as historically inaccurate as casting a Macedonian Greek queen as a Black African. Agenda drives both decisions, in Scott’s case, the commercial agenda of bankable white stars. The cultural debate around these two films has applied very different standards to equivalent historical falsifications. That tells you more about the cultural politics of the debate than about the films themselves.

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4. Gods of Egypt (2016)

► Read the full review of Gods of Egypt (2016)

Gerard Butler as Set. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Horus. Brenton Thwaites as the human protagonist. The Egyptian gods of the Nile Valley portrayed by Scottish and Australian actors with levels of tan. Director Alex Proyas issued a pre-release apology acknowledging the whitewashing, the mark of a filmmaker who knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway because the studio had the money and the casting decisions were already made.

The film bombed catastrophically in the United States and performed modestly internationally, and that’s the market’s correct assessment. It’s also an absurd film (the gods are twenty feet tall, there are robot spiders, Gerard Butler chews scenery with the glee of a man who has stopped caring) and in a different context might have been appreciated as campy entertainment. The whitewashing made sure nobody was in the mood to appreciate it as anything.

I gave it a four, and the casting is only part of the reason. Robot spiders and twenty-foot gods should add up to a goofy good time, and the film is too busy spending money to enjoy itself. A director who apologizes before opening day has told you he’s already given up on his own picture, and it plays exactly like that.

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5. Braveheart (1995)

► Read the full review of Braveheart (1995)

Braveheart is here for a different reason than the race-related entries above: it shows that historical falsification isn’t a new phenomenon or an ideological one. Mel Gibson’s film invents most of its story wholesale.

The kilts worn throughout didn’t exist until the 16th century, 300 years after the events depicted. Princess Isabella of France, shown as Wallace’s lover and pregnant with his child at his execution, was approximately three years old during the events depicted and didn’t arrive in England until years after Wallace’s death.

It invents Robert the Bruce’s betrayal of Wallace. It largely invents the romantic hero arc.

Scotland embraced the film regardless, and it’s become influential in Scottish national identity. That’s itself instructive about how historical falsification functions culturally. A sufficiently absorbing false version of history can displace the accurate version in popular memory. The film’s message (Scottish freedom, heroic sacrifice, English oppression) overrode the historical reality of William Wallace, who was a guerrilla leader of complex and somewhat brutal methods, not a romantic hero in a kilt.

I rate Braveheart an eight, and I enjoy the sheer drive of it. My reservation is that I can’t shake the knowledge that almost none of it happened. The real Wallace, brutal and complicated, would’ve made a harder and better film, and Gibson traded him for a romance with a princess who was three years old at the time.

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6. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

► Read the full review of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

On screen we see Mercury receiving his AIDS diagnosis immediately before the 1985 Live Aid concert, then performing as the concert’s emotional climax.

Implying the performance was his response to the diagnosis, his triumphant defiance of mortality. Mercury received his diagnosis in 1987, two years after Live Aid. The reordering was deliberate: it makes a more emotionally satisfying narrative at the cost of falsifying the actual timeline of a real person’s most private medical history.

Beyond that, it considerably minimizes the nature and duration of Mercury’s relationships with men, presenting his homosexuality as something he briefly explored instead of as the central fact of his personal life that it was. The surviving Queen members were producers on the film. That explains both the favorable treatment of the band’s history and the sanitization of Mercury’s life. The film won Best Picture at the Golden Globes. It’s a technically impressive piece of commercial mythology dressed as biography.

I rate it a seven, and most of those points belong to Rami Malek and the Live Aid finale, which is a thrill. The weak point: the filmmakers moved the diagnosis two years to sharpen the third act. That was a real man’s private medical history, shuffled around for a better ending, and knowing it takes some of the shine off the concert for me.

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7. Don’t Look Up (2021)

► Read the full review of Don’t Look Up (2021)

The film’s message (that the media, political, and technological establishment will deny a catastrophic threat until it’s too late) is correct.

Climate change is real, media incentives do distort coverage of existential risks, and political will is insufficient. None of this saves the film from the failure of making its argument through characters who exist solely to embody the positions they’re assigned. The president is dismissive. The media hosts are superficial. The tech billionaire is delusional. The scientists are ignored. Every character performs their label without being a person.

Network (the correct comparison, again) made the same argument about media and did so through characters with full psychological lives. Howard Beale’s breakdown is genuine. Diana Christensen’s emptiness is specific and has a history. Don’t Look Up‘s characters have positions instead of histories. The message is correct. The film mistakes having a correct message for having told a story.

Seven out of ten, because it’s funny in stretches and the cast is clearly having a ball. It still frustrates me. McKay had DiCaprio and Lawrence in the same film and gave them talking points to recite. I laughed at the jokes and couldn’t tell you one thing any of those people wanted for themselves.

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8. Strange World (2022)

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Strange World features Disney’s first openly gay teenage protagonist, an interracial family, an environmental allegory about unsustainable energy consumption, and a $180 million production budget. It made $11.9 million in its opening weekend, the worst opening for a Disney animated film in decades, and disappeared from theaters in weeks. The film is competently made, visually inventive, and the family dynamics have real warmth. What it lacks is a story with sufficient urgency, conflict, or emotional stakes to justify its own existence beyond its representation agenda.

An honest assessment: the gay teenage protagonist isn’t the reason the film failed commercially. The reason it failed is that the story is thin. But the gay protagonist and the environmental message were prioritized in development, marketing, and press coverage. That means the agenda, instead of whether the story would work, drove the film’s creative decisions. When representation and message come first and story comes second, the audience experiences a film that feels like it was made for an award instead of for them.

Three out of ten, and the visuals win every one of those points. The studio threw everything at the screen except a reason to care what happens next. The warmth in the family scenes makes it sadder, because you can see the movie it could’ve been if someone in the room had fought for the story as hard as they fought for the press release.

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9. Lightyear (2022)

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The Lightyear same-sex kiss story is a perfect case study in agenda-driven decision-making producing incoherence. Pixar included a same-sex couple’s kiss. Disney corporate cut it for the theatrical release. Pixar employees protested publicly. Disney restored it. The film was then banned in fourteen countries. The sequence of decisions reveals a studio with no consistent position on the content: adding it for virtue, removing it for commerce, restoring it for PR, and ending up with a film that became a culture war football instead of a children’s movie.

The wider problem with Lightyear is the premise: a film about the “real” Buzz Lightyear that the toy from Toy Story was based on, a level of franchise meta-fiction that required the audience to care about the fictional provenance of a toy character. They didn’t. The same-sex kiss controversy dominated coverage of a film that was misconceived before it arrived in theaters.

Four out of ten, and it’s a gloomy four. Pixar was the studio I trusted to put story first, and this is the film where that trust cracked. Nobody was asking for the in-universe movie a toy was based on, and all the noise about one kiss let the studio dodge the plainer problem that the idea was dead before anyone drew a frame.

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10. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena Shaw is consistently smarter, faster, more resourceful, and more accurate than Indiana Jones in every scene they share. This would be fine if the film were Helena Shaw’s story. It’s Indiana Jones’s story (or is supposed to be) and the consistent pattern of Helena being right while Indy is wrong serves an agenda about passing the torch to a younger female character instead of serving the story of the aged hero’s final adventure.

The failure is that the film systematically uses Helena’s capability (Marion Ravenwood was capable too) to diminish Indy. The Indiana Jones films worked because Indy was competent and the world was resistant to his competence. The hero whose younger companion consistently shows him up in his own film is a legacy character being retired to make room for someone else.

I gave this a one, and it’s the lowest number on the page for a reason. A sidekick corrects Harrison Ford all through his farewell to Indy, and it is insulting. That character carried decades of goodwill into this film, and the script treated him like furniture to be cleared out for the next tenant.

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11. Snow White (2025)

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Rachel Zegler spent the pre-release period explaining that the new Snow White wouldn’t be about a girl waiting for a man, that she found the original story problematic, and that the new version would be more empowering. The film then delivered a version that still has a love story, just a different one, and reimagined Snow White as an aspiring leader instead of a passive fairy tale heroine. The creative choices are defensible in isolation. The public campaign against the material being adapted isn’t.

The failure is that Zegler’s statements, whatever their intent, told the existing Snow White audience that their attachment to the original was based on values the new film would correct. The audience for Snow White is largely children and adults who remember loving the original. Being told that what they loved was problematic isn’t an effective invitation to purchase a ticket. The agenda preceded the film, contaminated the marketing, and the film paid for it regardless of its actual quality.

A two from me, and the marketing isn’t the only reason. The film itself is lifeless, and Disney poured a staggering sum into making the people who loved the cartoon feel scolded for it. That’s a spectacular way to lose an audience that was already in its seats and waiting to be charmed.

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12. The Rings of Power (2022) – TV Series

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Tolkien’s world includes specific physical descriptions for many of his characters and peoples. The Rings of Power cast Black and mixed-race actors in roles that Tolkien described with European physical characteristics, and cast a Black actress as a Harfoot (an ancestor of Hobbits, whom Tolkien described consistently as English country folk in appearance). The production accompanied the creative decision with statements about diversity being a value, and any criticism of the casting choices was treated publicly as evidence of racism.

The distinction that matters: racism drove some criticism of the casting, and real attachment to Tolkien’s specific vision of his world drove other criticism. Conflating the two (which the production did deliberately) is its own form of bad faith. A reader who objects to the show depicting Tolkien’s Harfoots as Black because Tolkien described them as English country folk isn’t necessarily making a racial argument. They may be making a fidelity-to-source argument.

The production’s choice to treat all fidelity objections as racial ones prevented any honest conversation about the real creative question: when does adaptation’s right to reinterpret end and obligation to the source’s vision begin?

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13. The Little Mermaid (2023)

The Little Mermaid is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a fictional mermaid. There’s no historical Ariel. Andersen’s story doesn’t specify Ariel’s race.

The animated Disney version gave the character red hair and pale skin. That became the visual identity tied to the character for thirty years. The live action version cast Halle Bailey, a Black actress. That produced a significant cultural backlash and a significant cultural defense.

Where I land: casting a Black actress as a fictional mermaid from a fairy tale isn’t historically equivalent to casting a Black actress as a documented Macedonian Greek queen. One is a creative choice about a fictional character; the other is falsification of historical record. The backlash that treated both as equivalent failures was wrong about The Little Mermaid. Halle Bailey’s performance is excellent. The film is mediocre for the same reasons all the Disney live action remakes are mediocre. They have nothing to do with the casting.

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14. Hamilton (2015 / Disney+ 2020)

Hamilton’s color-conscious casting, Black and Latino actors as the Founding Fathers, announces itself as a deliberate artistic choice instead of claiming historical accuracy.

This is the key distinction that separates it from the fraudulent entries above: Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t claiming that Alexander Hamilton was Black. He’s making a theatrical argument about who owns American history and who gets to tell it, using casting as part of that argument. The form is transparent about its intent.

The complication is thematic. Hamilton presents its subjects (Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Madison) as founders of a great democratic experiment, and the Black and Latino actors embodying them produce a powerful argument about American belonging. What the musical largely sidesteps is that several of these men were slaveholders, and Jefferson in particular has a legacy that the musical’s celebratory structure struggles to accommodate. The casting that makes the story more inclusive also makes it more difficult to engage honestly with the history’s darkest elements. Both things are true.

I think Hamilton’s casting works completely. Miranda tells you exactly what he’s doing and then does it with more energy than most musicals manage in a decade. My complaint is the one this entry already names. A show this confident could’ve looked Jefferson in the eye and still brought the house down.

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15. Amadeus (1984)

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Amadeus presents Salieri as Mozart’s nemesis and murderer, a completely invented narrative with no historical basis. The real Antonio Salieri was a respected court composer who had a professional but not personally hostile relationship with Mozart. He didn’t poison Mozart. The film’s premise is fiction built around real historical names. It’s presented as dramatic fiction based on a stage play, and it never claims to be history.

The complication is that Amadeus is so powerful and so widely seen that it’s become the dominant popular understanding of both men. Salieri is now synonymous with mediocrity and envy, a reputation he didn’t have and didn’t deserve, created by a playwright’s invention. The film is honest about being fiction. It’s nonetheless shaped the historical record in the popular imagination more effectively than any biography. This is a complication the film shares with Braveheart and with every successful historical fiction, the convincing false version displaces the accurate version in the culture.

Nine out of ten, and I’d put this rivalry up against anything in eighties cinema. The music does half the work and Forman does the other half. It’s unfair that people now remember the real Salieri, a respected composer who can’t object, as the patron saint of envy because a playwright needed a villain.

The Distinctions That Matter

The cultural debate about representation, historical accuracy, and agenda-driven filmmaking frequently collapses different cases into a single argument. The structure used here (Historical Fraud, Agenda Over Narrative, Complicated) is an attempt to restore the distinctions.

The most important distinction: casting a Black actress as a documented Macedonian Greek queen in a documentary claiming historical accuracy isn’t the same thing as casting a Black actress as a fictional Danish mermaid in an admitted remake. Treating them as equivalent, in either direction, is the failure of analysis that produces the most heat and the least light in these debates.

My verdict on the whole lot is the same one I’d give any writer. Tell the truth about real people and give invented ones a story worth sitting through, and you can carry any message you like. The films on this list that failed did it because someone decided the point mattered more than the people, dead or made up, and audiences can smell that from the back row.

Which message film on this list is judged unfairly?

The category assignments are the most debatable element. Drop your arguments in the comments, especially if you think any Complicated entry belongs in a different category.

Honorable Mentions

13 more reviewed on this site and worth your time, ranked by the same scale as the list above.