Watching TV back in France the night before last, I saw a lot of flagwaving for an any-night-now showing of Pearl Harbour, the movie starring Ben Affleck and (as I recall) Kate Beckinsale. I didn't see this movie and I don't plan to. I don't like battle movies which mash fact and fiction together the way this one does, and as do others such as The Battle of the Bulge and Midway. Midway featured a particularly annoying character played by Charlton Heston, called "Matt Garth", who dragged in a sub-plot involving a Japanese daughter-in-law. The real Midway had quite enough all-American heroes involved without them having to fake up another. And The Battle of the Bulge was likewise populated with "composite characters". Either the battle is background, in which case fine, the real story is something else and you can fake it all you like. Or it is the foreground, in which case spare me the fictional sub-plots.
The other thing that upsets me about these high-concept high-tech super-special effects low-accuracy battle movies is the shocking waste of all those special effects. All that military expertise about which guns they used and what kind of noise they made and what sort of uniforms everyone was wearing. Why waste it on a soap opera movie? It must be heartbreaking to do all that technical stuff and then watch the movie people piss on it by changing the uniforms to make them more filmic and more appealing to the teen market, and change the noise made by the guns because it isn't noisy enough or is too noisy, or make all the action occupy less physical space than it really did so that it can be more conveniently photographed. Above all what is the point of a movie which gets some Nazi general's uniform spot on, but which gets him, the general, completely wrong so that some bankable actor can be accommodated into the project?
Meanwhile, another art form is sneaking up on the rails, in the form of the historical documentary, fronted by a story teller, and fleshed out with scenes acted out by actors, in a very rudimentary fashion and in a way which is now careful not to treat on the toes of any of the big actors with names you've heard of. Here there is at least an all round attempt to get the story exactly right. Of couse different story tellers will have a different take on the story, but there's none of that "only the facts have been changed in order to tell the story better" nonsense that you get in the "real" movies. Nothing is deliberate made up. There are no Matt Garths fighting at Midway or tiny tank battles pretending to be the Battle of the Bulge.
What I wish I could see would be one of those TV story tellers fronting high-tech super-special-effects tellings of the stories of these battles. That way I'd get to see not just all those totally accurate weapons doing whatever they did, but I'd get someone at the front telling me what the hell was actually going on, and why this set of guys won and that set of guys lost. Let's see the action, and the maps with the moving arrows, explaining why that particular bit of action was so important. If you watch The Battle of Midway you get the general idea that the USA won against Japan by sinking a bunch of aircraft carriers, and by a guy in a dressing gown breaking some codes, but you don't get what an almighty god-damned fluke it all was, how absolutely and totally amazing the story of that battle really was. That you can only learn now from reading a book. That you can only learn from a narrator.
Why were there no maps for us to look at during A Bridge Too Far (which was about the Arnhem campaign)? And why couldn't it have been a real historian doing a detailed and accurate voice-over, instead of some Swedish actress doing a totally bogus bit of voice-overing only at the beginning and the end. Well, maybe the map for the Arnhem campaign is so simple that they could do without it, and just have people talk us through it. But Midway? The Bulge? Most other battles ever fought? If all they show you is bangs and shouting and killing, then that's all you'll get. You may say: oh, maps will make it all too clear. Real warfare is confused. In real battles you don't know what is happening, or what happened.
But a good narrator is perfectly capable of making that point. And I already know that if you die in mid-battle, you don't get to hear the result. I know that. I just think it would make a whole lot more sense to have a military historian fleshing out the details of what it all means and meant than having Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale playing two made-up people having a love interest.
Economically, it could work. Special effects are getting better all the time, and so potentially a lot cheaper without embarrassment. Good documentaries, both military and historical generally, are getting ever more popular, partly because there are so many more old people around than there used to be. Documentaries are getting easier to finance in the age of the DVD (a particular important product for oldies who don't get out so much), just as lots of other kinds of video material are.
All that's missing right now is the open-hearted acceptance that this way of telling stories is a reasonable one.
