Ever since my father told the teen me that “based on a true story” doesn’t mean it’s a documentary I stopped watching those things altogether, since then I only engage with historical fiction if it’s so out there it’s obvious it’s not real.
That’s a pretty narrow way to cut yourself off from a LOT of great storytelling.
Some works will outright lie about it. For example, the TV show and movie Fargo specifically tell you it’s a true story, and even that names have been changed but ‘the rest has been told exactly as it happened’.
To me that’s weird. It doesn’t really add to the end result in my opinion, but would breed distrust when people discovered it was wholly fictional.
Still, even with things that are meant to be accurate portrayal of an event, it’s always good to check the facts. Hollywood just can’t help but fiddle with reality to tell a more interesting story, even when it doesn’t need it.
Yeah, that wording is so misleading. “Inspired by real events” is the more accurate wording, but I feel like I haven’t seen anything with that in ages.
“Inspired by” is way more loose than “dramatization of historical events”. The former can be pretty much anything even loosely based on some idea, but the latter has a more strict set of rules, although still rather subjective.
Chernobyl was definitely a dramatization, not just “inspired by”. It really did tell the events much as they happened, only taking liberties in things that truly required it for the show to work as drama. Like one thing they did was replace what was a large panel of scientists with one character who made the points the panel did. Does that take away from the veracity of the events? I think not much at least.
Couldn’t hide my disappointment at the end when they were like [strong female character] was created from the stories of over fifty different scientists…
Does the female aspect really matter because if not you could just leave it out… I’m sure many would still agree with you.
Um… I don’t think it matters to me what the characters gender was, but it seemed like the least I could do since I wasn’t going to go back and look up the characters name.
I think you’re reading something into my comment I don’t intend? Strictly referring to a character Ulana Khomyuk from the HBO miniseries here.
They thought you were mad there was a woman scientist and not that they reduced 50 people to 1.
That’s how many historical movies and contemporary shows work though. Like, we all know CSI techs aren’t clearing rooms like SWAT in real life. But the story is far easier to follow if we keep it to a few characters the audience knows.
Hand generated by LLM, of course.
It’s a great show but it’s also all bullshit pretty much, it only follows the broad strokes of the real story.
Oh. People from English-speaking countries don’t sink you with downvotes immediately for criticizing that show anymore. Nice.
Even the broad strokes are, eh, how do you say it, eh … worse than Tom Clancy and that’s an achievement I’m not sure everyone is capable of measuring.
It’s funny though how such series about “USSR” talk in fact about something American. Reminiscent of the “17 moments of spring” series which were about a Soviet spy in Berlin in the last months of WWII, but mostly explored Soviet ideology and morality issues.
If we’re talking about the HBO show, then calling it a documentary is just straight up wrong in the first place.
It’s a “based on real events” TV drama that never claimed to be a rigorous retelling of the catastrophe.
There are a ton of immediate differences to reality that anyone even vaguely familiar with soviet history would notice.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)#Historical_accuracy
Lemmy won’t let me link this properly. Is there an escape character for brackets? This is the link I’m trying to post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)#Historical_accuracy
Is this a Chernobyl joke?
