I normally write articles to analyze ongoing things in today’s world. However, for this article, I want to give you my opinion, not on how history unfolds right now, but on how it gets to be depicted in cinema. I feel very badly about the current direction of cinematography, specifically regarding films about history that lack the depth and detail they need in order to have value as authentic representations of our past.
Among the common things, such as inaccuracies, false depictions, bias and even the taking of “creative liberty,” my biggest gripe is that movies about history are too rushed. The given scenario in these films does not have enough content to explain the scenario’s context, and sometimes it feels like the movie is almost struggling to “breathe.” What I mean is that a story about an event or a person can often stretch across years and even decades, but, in a poorly made movie, you’ll only see the scenario jumping from one point in time to another without any proper explanations or connections. There are excellent movies out there like “Das Boot” (1981, dir. Wolfgang Petersen) or “1917” (2019, dir. Sam Mendes) that do manage to successfully tell their stories — only because the directors have the creative skill to take their time and, thus, let us understand the plot, characters and the environment. Apart from good ones like those, many films today fall into the same trap of condensing history, choking it to make it fit into 150 or so minutes.
A good example of this mistake is the recent “Napoleon” (2023, dir. Ridley Scott.) The premise for this movie was superb — the history of a powerful and ambitious man is to be shown on film, and the movie will let us learn about his skill, mind and perhaps soul and emotions too. However, the movie failed miserably in achieving that. Reviews for the movie criticize it for being lazy and rushed and for having a confusing timeline that does not allow the viewer to understand the meaning behind all the history in it. Two hours and 38 minutes might be a lot of time, but it simply isn’t enough to condense the history and character of someone like him. The whole movie just jumps between events at a breakneck speed. There simply wasn’t enough time to show the origin, rise and fall of a man like Napoleon. As a result, what we got was just a series of poorly connected scenes that glossed over an unforgivable amount of detail and nuance.
A different example from recent memory is “Oppenheimer” (2023, dir. Christopher Nolan) — it is rightfully liked by many and deserves to be seen by all, but I have a feeling of dissatisfaction about this movie, too. The film’s title implies that this is the story of one man, but, even with the enormous three-hour-long runtime, the story lacked details that should have been included to portray truth and accuracy. The movie is, by all means, a good one, but it is not as good as it could have been. For instance, if it had been a television series with different episodes, there would have been enough time to cover the missing yet crucial details the movie lacked. The problem for me is that when directors do take liberties, the skewed version of history that is taught becomes what people remember — the way people can feel and think about history changes with those decisions, which I find — at the very least — concerning.
When reading the books and stories about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer and when you put the whole complex story of the race for the bomb on top of it, it just feels like the film’s storyline could have been stretched out more, even if the film wasn’t necessarily rushed. More things could have been shown with the same level of excellent cinematography, and people would perhaps have even more profound thoughts about the legacy of the bomb’s invention. More things could have been said about the foreign scientists and their emotions, the various other test sites and the context for the political controversies about leftism from that time.
This is complicated enough of a topic to probably even write a doctoral thesis about, but, in essence, my problem is that ideas that are exciting to learn about from history often get cropped down to small bits in cinema. New history movies leave me dissatisfied because so many things that could have and should have been said or shown are just not there. The inadequacy of feature-length productions makes me want to see history being shown not in movies but rather in a series structure with episodes that can take the time to cover a lot more than even the longest movies out there. The power of cinema comes from going beyond documentaries that already focus on telling facts, and that power lies in the skill of telling stories. When those stories are badly told, rushed or oversimplified, that power smolders with it too. I would be happier to see a new trend in which it is encouraged to depict history in longer series with detail and style. That is a way for history in cinema to be elevated from something that is temporarily famous to something that is permanently a masterpiece.
Deniz Gulay is a sophomore majoring in history.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.