Gosh darn it. This WW2 based drama has been absolutely ruined by my ninth grade history teacher and by several books, some mentions in newspapers and the internet as a whole.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite glad, relieved even, at the outcome. Those Nazis seem like pretty bad blokes, what with their weird uniforms bearing skulls and their genocides and what not, but I really would have liked to have seen the entirety of this feature length film about them without having read the source material in the ninth grade.
Here I am watching an Allied world leader give a passionate call to arms to his people, rivaling the President’s speech from 1996 smash hit ‘Independence Day’ – y’know the one where Will Smith punches an alien – and while I’m watching this man point at people and slap desks, in the back of my head, all I can think is, ‘okay, yeah I know you win’. Wonderful speech, lots of spittle. It works, I get it.
And because there are so many films with the same backdrop, one text book has ruined even more feature length movies. Dunkirk, Fury, Hacksaw Ridge, The Pianist, Jojo Rabbit. So many great films. At least Quinten Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’ had the decency to be historically inaccurate. Hitler gets shot in the face. By someone else. Same end result but so much more satisfying and more importantly, surprising. Certainly not cannon to the World War Lore.
But this is far from the only major historical event spoiled by the existence of books, newspapers and generally proper documentation of world events. I watched Chernobyl, already fully aware that bad stuff was about to go down. I’ve been watching Mrs. America though I know the ERA did not get ratified, and I witnessed Michael Jordan team up with Buggs Bunny against some aliens despite knowing what the final score would be through a quick search on Google, which as we all know is the biggest online history book to have ever been written.
The Ipe Collection 