I keep seeing this is based on truie events. I have read Rape of Nanking and other historical accounts. Do not ever remember anything about an American mortician. So who was Christian Bale suppose to be in real life? Was there REALLY an American mortician at a big church back then?
shareIt was "inspired" by true events. The Rape of Nanking was real. I strongly suspect the story is fictitious.
I'm not getting smarter as I age, I'm just running out of stupid things to do!share
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Why make up something goofy?
This is cinema my friend, not a tv documentary. Most war movies are pure fiction set in a historical time frame.
How about Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, The Guns of Navarone, The Bridge of the River Kwai, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, Stalag 17 and all those classic war dramas?
Did you really think they were based on real events?
Actually, The Great Escape is a true story. It happened in March 1944. Seventy-six prisoners escaped from Stalag Luft III, all but three were recaptured. Just like in the movie, they dug three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry. They also had the track and cart system, like in the movie, to move dirt and men. The 77th man was spotted by guards coming up through the hole. Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was Big X who was in charge of the operation. Like in the movie, after they were caught, Bushell and forty-nine others (50) were murdered by the Gestapo on direct orders from Hitler. The movie had it pretty right on with other things too.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is based on the building of the Burma & Siam (Thailand) railroad. Also known as the Death Railway. Around a 100,000 or so prisoner's of war and civilians combined, died building it. Alec Guiness's character was based on Lt. Colonel Philip Toosey, but he wasn't a deranged collaborator like Guiness's character.
The "Bridge on the River Kwai" literally doesn't exist though.
The movie is an adaptation from a French novel written by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote "planet of the Apes").
The Death Railway's very real, but for unknown/creative reasons, Boulle located it along the wrong river in Thailand.
Given the # of tourists who visit the place thanks to the movie, the Thai Gov actually had to change the name of the "real" river to "Kwai noy" (little Kwai/Buffalo): the real river Kwai is much wider and further south, and not a good location to build a railway.
Boulle was an engineer in Malaysia when WW2 broke out, so he joined the British military base in Singapore, and fought very valiantly. After he escaped captivity in Saigon, he was awarded many decorations by De Gaulle.
old-dude's lamentation
". . . must be ficticious [or] whatever you wanna call it [as] it glosses over a tradgedy . . ."
Setting aside your appalling lack of grammatical consistency, you present a very odd attack upon an unusually fine film. There is the admission that you like the film, however, as the film is not entirely true, but merely inspired by real events, you summon up your best criticism and name it "goofy," as well as "a bag of dung."
Accordingly, so you claim, this might have been a better film if those magnificent scenes of great sacrifice and tenderness, of breathtaking terror and ultimate triumph, were omitted to make room for more scenes of sword beheadings . . As they occurred in Nanking, we must, in any and every film set in 1937 Nanking, see sword beheading and only sword beheadings; and not one bit of story-telling if that story is not entirely true.
You’ve gathered precious little wisdom while here on this planet. Your near and dear posterity has my sympathies.
—PmCƒ(×)
American dignity of all the many posts I've read on this board I find your comments to be some of the most accurate and articulate.
shareOld-dude, are you on drugs? If you want 100% accuracy, go watch a documentary. Glosses over a tragedy? The movie showed hundreds of Chinese dead, bayoneting, brutality, rape, torture. Looked pretty tragic to me. You say "It must be fictitious and that makes the movie a complete BOMB". So don't EVER again watch a movie that is remotely fictitious.
shareThe movie is fiction - no surprise there. But it is also Communist propaganda, which is rarer.
shareIt's based on a Novel written in Chinese, "Jing Ling 13 Women" and that novel was based on REAL events, albeit in a mixed-up way, most of which are from the diary of an American school teacher, Minnie Vautrin.
Christian Bale was most likely a composite of Minnie Vautrin and missionary John Magee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Vautrin
The underlying narrative elements have a decent amount of truth to them (Japanese doing brutal things, foreign nationals basically receiving special treatment), but as far as I can find, the actual "prostitutes, students and westerner in a church" premise is entirely fictitious.
This seems to a typical trend for Chinese cinema of going a bit overly heroic with Chinese soldiers/heroes and - if present - over-villifying the Japanese (Ip Man being the immediate film that comes to mind).
But you could argue it is not "a typical trend for Chinise cinema", but a standard story-telling technique: the same logic is followed in films that are talking about WW II and Allies/Nazis. I don't think it is about "glossing over the heroics/over vilifying the bad guy" as it is the hero/victim's side telling the story from their "actual point of view". I'm pretty sure that if "the bad guys" told their story, they'd gloss their part as heroes and vilify the victims.
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just a thought, no matter how dumb it sounds, unfortunately for you: that�s me!!!
See the movie "John Rabe" (2009)or the documentary "Nanking" (2007) if you want based-on-real-events.
Both include the story of the missionaries which are mentioned in the other replies above & are excellent movies imho.
It was actually a Nazi that tried to stop the rape of Nanking and saved hundreds of thousands. This story is just BS that they wanted to use to get someone like Christian Bale to play.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
is a drunk bastard
shareI think the specific story is fiction. Thank god it wasn’t true, although unfortunately it was based off of very true things that happened.
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