This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

Films that are “based on a true story” obviously take some liberties with the truth. They have to be interesting! But have you ever wondered which scenes are real and which made up? Now you can check some recent blockbusters with a scene-by-scene breakdown.

The site Information is Beautiful is providing an invaluable service to the film-going public: the ability to be an insufferable know-it-all during films based on true historical events. The interactive feature has carved up ten recent movies into their individual scenes and grades each scene as “true”, “true-ish”, “false-ish” and “false”. You can set the grading system to different levels of scepticism, from “Flexible” to “Only the Absolute Truth”.

This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

The timelines from the movies give you a quick look at how truthful each movie is being. The pinker the line, the more fibs the filmmakers have told. The Big Short is the most accurate of the bunch, by the way. An impressive 88.7 per cent of its scenes are characterised as truthful. Trailing behind everyone else is the Alan Turing biopic, The Imitation Game, in which only 35.7 per cent of the scenes are actually based on the truth.

Click on an individual scene, and you’ll get a description of the scene as well as a run down of what the checkers found right or wrong about it.

This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

It’s interesting to see the various ways filmmakers changed history for the purposes of their art. Some changes are understandable. To tell a coherent story, films sometimes have to combine two characters to make one or compress historical events, in order to make the narrative smooth.

Other changes are made for the sake of characterisation — which seems an odd choice for a biopic about a historical character. The Imitation Game earns a high “False” rating in part because it characterises Alan Turing as a humourless, unsociable and friendless outsider who possibly had both obsessive compulsive disorder and was on the autism spectrum. Most of the people who worked with him agreed that, while he could be prickly, he was respected, sociable and well-liked among his colleagues. They also say he showed no evidence of having autism or OCD.

Then there’s the truly unforgivable stuff, like pretending Turing knew about a Soviet spy.

This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

When looking through the scenes on some of the movies, it becomes clear how overtly some films impose their own narrative. It’s common knowledge that The Social Network included a female character, an ex-girlfriend to Mark Zuckerberg who never existed. It’s only when looking through each scene, seeing how an encounter with this made-up human being changes “Zuckerberg’s” motivation. And ultimately, Zuckerberg’s imagined motivation to start Facebook to get girls makes you realise how the whole movie is based on a manufactured story in a painfully misleading way.

This Website Shows You Which Scenes In Movies Based On A True Story Are Actually True

All in all, this is a good way to get a sense of how and why “true” movies diverge from reality. And it will furnish you with a lot of trivia with which you can make your friends miserable on Oscar night.

Explore more movies here and enjoy!

[Information is Beautiful]

Screenshot: Information Is Beautiful


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