History Movies: The Patriot And The New World

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Movies, as one of the greatest product of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, are a brand new form of media for entertainment. Directors, as the architects of movies, are the ones to blame when movies come out bad and the ones to praise when movies come out good. Not only do they need to design a fascinating story, use devices to push forward the plot, and make characters as vivid as possible to the audience, but they also need to consider the contemporary ideology and political correctness in order to film a movie that’s not too widely divergent to the thinking at the time. History movies are more or less different than the regular ones in that directors sometimes have to choose whether to sacrifice the authenticity of the history to …show more content…

The New World is a typical history movie in which the history was not twisted enough so that the movie became boring. The director focused so much on the actual events happened in Jamestown and everything happened to Pocahontas and John Smith that he missed the part where movies have to be entertaining so that people wouldn’t fall asleep during the process. He filmed it almost like a documentary. Me personally, if he just gives the audience a tiny bit of romantic relationship between Pocahontas and Smith, the movie would go as smooth as smooth can get. But no. Malick was so obsessed with sticking to the history that he never noticed the movie was not entertaining at all. The Patriot, on the other hand, exemplifies the history movies that twisted too much history. Benjamin Martin is a South Carolina plantation owner who set free all of his slaves before the Revolutionary War, which was impossible to happen in the actual history. A pacifist who opposed the Revolutionary War but shifted position right after his second son was mercilessly killed by a British officer Tavington, and he single-handedly slaughtered twenty-some red coats. After the death of his first son, he suddenly fought the war not for revenge but for a higher cause -- democracy and freedom. It appeared like he single-handedly won the Revolutionary War, making the audience wonder Washington who, while we can not even find a man named Benjamin Martin at that time because Emmerich decides to just make him up out of other characters in the actual history and combines them into one epic hero called Benjamin Martin. The entertainment was awesome. I mean, who doesn’t like a superhero figure fights the villains and finally gets justice for all? The war scenes, the fighting actions were just damn perfect and addictive. However, unlike Malick who twisted so little history, Emmerich focused so much on entertainment that

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